Deputy Minister wraps up Women’s month in Soweto
The event in partnership with community based organisation Innovating Kasi Organisation (IKO) sought to celebrate Women’s Months.
Deputy Minister of Small Business and Development, Sdumo Dlamini concluded his month long tour across the country by engaging with women in business with his last stop in Orlando East’s communal Hall last week.
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The event in partnership with community based organisation Innovating Kasi Organisation (IKO) sought to celebrate Women’s Months and bring to focus the mounting challenges facing women running small businesses in the country.
The theme was ‘Women’s socioeconomic rights and empowerment: building back better for women’s improved resilience.’
Dlamini used his address to highlight the current injustices against women and further condemned the scenes of violence saying the abuse of women must come to an end.
“The challenges that women are facing in this country of poverty, unemployment and inequality are not just their challenge but they are for all of us.
“We are responsible for fighting these issues and making sure that we have long term solutions and that’s why as a department that we come here to be with you as you roll out on this month,” he began his address.
Dlamini said the event was necessary as many women still faced patriarch and barriers in accessing information and markets to grow their businesses.
“The lack of information and lack of access to markets remains the biggest stumbling block for entrepreneurs.
That’s why we are here to assist to give them those resources and link them with relevant organisations that will see that ideas become fully fledged and thriving businesses, which is important for us as a department,” he said.
The Deputy Minister furthermore strengthened calls for more people and in particular women and the youth to go in business citing entrepreneurship as being the only way to strengthen and revive the current struggling economy.
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He revealed that his department had been tasked with employing 9 million people by 2030. This is part of government’s plan of creating 11 million jobs over the same period as it tries to tackle the unemployment crisis in the country.
He said it was a “disaster” that only 1-6% of women have benefitted from the allocated 40% of public procurement for women-owned enterprises as announced by the president in 2020.
“Our target through businesses and cooperatives is 9 million people by 2030 and these people are not going to be employed in the department but employed by businesses therefore we need the private sector to come on board and work with government, however this also means that going forward, we need to see women participating in such empowerment programmes to help boost the economy, grow their businesses and in turn absorb more people,” he said.
The department’s Chief Director for Women, Youth and Persons with disabilities, Nomvula Makgotlho said their work was to expose women to business opportunities in their department.
“This is how we are closing the month of women through empowerment with information and stakeholders within the business sector to help them in their ventures but it also allows us to gauge where their needs are not being met,” she said.
“This is a month where we continue to see women being exposed to a lot of horrible situations of GBV. We are saying with economic empowerment, we will see a lot of our women and young women liberated economically to be able to take their own power and move away from these relationships.”
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