Upgrade for Jo'burg traders

Wits Enterprise, the commercial company of Wits University, contracted by the City of Johannesburg has just completed business improvement training of 500 more informal sector entrepreneurs, the university said in a statement.

This is the second year that the project has been run and brings the total number of informal traders trained to over 1 000.

Each learner attended at least one three-hour session per week for 14 weeks.

The formal training covered basic fundamentals of Small Business Management such as developing a business plan, budgeting and basic financial management, pricing, marketing, making a business grow, sustaining a small business, legislative imperatives on small businesses, metro legislative requirements, sourcing finance and networking, the statement said.

According to Dr Johann Swanepoel from Wits Enterprise, a new component was added this year where a group of 50 Early Childhood Development (ECD) Site Managers also received EDU supported training.

"Their training included critical aspects such as compliance with relevant legislation, the roles of the various government departments and labour relations issues," he said.

The Curriculum Development Project Trust also played a mayor role in the training of the ECD Managers. They identified suitable candidates for training and provided fundraising skills development workshops and training in the creative transformation of recycled waste materials for learning and teaching resources and income generation opportunities for under-resourced ECD environments.

While the training material was developed by a Wits academic from the School of Economic and Business Sciences and packaged by professional instructional designers, it was the Students In Free Enterprise (SIFE), a voluntary student organisation dedicated to the upliftment and empowerment of South African micro- and subsistence entrepreneurs, that trained a team of facilitators for the project.

Mentoring was done by the students under the guidance of academics and comprised visits to the actual business sites, group meetings,networking and funding advice.

"In order to ensure maximum success, various quality assurance measures have been put in place," says Swanepoel. "We had a total of 25 facilitators who worked with 20 learners."