Most SMEs in South Africa have limited access to finance and this is certainly also the case for small businesses within the John Taolo Gaetsewe District Municipal boundaries around Kuruman in the Northern Cape province.
The financing problems faced by the SMEs did not go unnoticed, with the result that several businesses locally and elsewhere spontaneously joined in to establish a number of different initiatives in an effort to make capital accessible to some of these SMEs. This collaboration led to the approval of a fund with a total value of R4,2 million, shared among 35 SMEs, with an allocation of R120 000 per SME. The proceeds were intended to enable them to meet their immediate business needs.
Tushiyah’s role extended to the management of this grant funding available for support these Kuruman SMEs. During May 2022 Tushiyah went through a process of identifying needs of SMEs from previous programmes which were documented and presented to a large corporate in the Enterprise and Supplier Development environment as part of a need’s requirement report for each participant. Following this, two cohorts made up the groups considered for funding and development.
Cohort A comprised of 18 SMEs who had participated in an enterprise development programme with Tushiyah during the financial years 2020 to 2022 with their needs already identified early on. Cohort B comprised of 17 SMEs, some of whom were visitors to the Kuruman Business Centre (another Tushiyah joint project in Kuruman), as well as SMEs not known to the Tushiyah team, whose contact details were shared with Tushiyah in May 2022.
The process was initiated through authenticating procurement requirements, and a needs analysis report was forwarded to the grant funders for approval. In cases where the needs were confirmed to be outside the scope of the grant funding conditions, beneficiaries were engaged and requested to submit alternative needs. The latter was followed by site verifications aimed at ensuring that the participating businesses were active and that the expressed needs were legitimate support requirements.
A total of 19 clustered RFQs were prepared and 8 of the 19 RFQs advertised during May 2022. Responses were received in June 2022 for marketing services on the two cohorts. The successfulservice providerssigned appointment letters whilst accepting the Ts & Cs, after which invoices with delivery notes were submitted to the centre manager for approval and were then concluded by Tushiyah. R 3.7M of the R4.2M grant funding was disbursed by August 2022.
Marisa Truter, director at Tushiyah, expressed her satisfaction with the completion of a due diligence exercise to ensure a high level of compliance: “We are proud to have been instrumental in ensuring ethical distribution of capital to such a large number of SMEs, while satisfying the need from the sponsors that the money was used with minimal risk, carefully monitoring the process to maximise benefit by the participants,” she said
To view the full article, click on this link: https://tushiyah.co.za/proposal/grant_funding_article.pdf
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