Who is preparing the buyer
South Africa's latest employment figures are a reminder of the scale of the challenge we continue to face. In the second quarter of 2026, the official unemployment rate rose to 33.6%, while youth unemployment increased to 47.4%.
It is understandable that entrepreneurship remains an important part of our national response. Growing businesses can create jobs, widen economic participation and generate opportunities in communities where formal employment may be limited.
Much of our work in enterprise development focuses, quite correctly, on preparing entrepreneurs for growth.
We help businesses improve their financial management, strengthen operations, meet compliance requirements, refine their products and services and become better equipped to pursue larger opportunities.
But perhaps there is another question worth asking.
While we are preparing entrepreneurs for markets, are we paying enough attention to preparing markets for entrepreneurs?
This is not about lowering procurement standards or asking buyers to take on unreasonable risk. Small businesses need to demonstrate that they can deliver consistently, price appropriately, meet quality standards and manage the demands that come with larger contracts.
But readiness is only one side of a transaction.
A business can have a strong product, sound systems and the capacity to expand, but growth ultimately depends on someone choosing to buy what it produces.
In our work with entrepreneurs at the SAB Foundation, we see it repeatedly. Supporting entrepreneurs to strengthen their businesses creates the conditions for growth, but those conditions still need to meet real commercial opportunity.
This is particularly important when we consider employment.
A manufacturer is more likely to hire when orders increase. An agricultural business expands production when it has reliable buyers. A services company adds another employee when its customer base can sustain the cost. For many social innovators, growth may depend on a school, clinic, municipality, corporate or community institution deciding to adopt a solution.
The connection between enterprise support and employment therefore runs through demand.
There are encouraging signs that this is receiving greater attention. South Africa's National Entrepreneurship Strategy includes improving access to finance and markets as one of its five pillars. Government has also placed greater emphasis on local and export market opportunities, supplier development, procurement and helping small businesses participate more meaningfully in value chains.
The opportunity now is to deepen that work.
For entrepreneurs, this means continuing to build businesses that buyers can trust to deliver.
For larger businesses, government and other institutions, it means continuing to examine how procurement and supplier development can create genuine commercial opportunities for capable smaller enterprises, or unintentionally making it harder for them to participate.
Neither side can do it alone.
Buyers have legitimate requirements around quality, reliability, scale, governance and price. Preparing the buyer is not about lowering those standards. It is about ensuring that legitimate requirements do not become unnecessarily exclusionary processes, and that procurement systems are able to identify, onboard and grow credible smaller suppliers. Entrepreneurs, in turn, need the opportunity to demonstrate that they can meet those requirements. The role of enterprise support should increasingly be to help close the distance between those two realities.
That may also require us to think differently about what we mean by market access.
An introduction to a buyer is useful. An exhibition can create visibility. A supplier database can open a door. These are opportunities, but they are not yet a market. A market exists when somebody buys and, ideally, buys again. That is the difference between access and sustainable market participation.
The more meaningful question is what happens afterwards.
Did the business secure an order? Was it able to fulfil it successfully? Did the customer return? Did the relationship lead to repeat business or a larger contract? And, over time, did that additional demand give the entrepreneur the confidence and financial capacity to invest, expand and employ more people?
These are harder outcomes to achieve and harder to measure, but they bring us closer to understanding whether enterprise development is contributing to sustainable growth.
This does not mean that every supported business will become a large employer, nor should that be the expectation. Businesses operate in different sectors, at different stages and with very different growth possibilities.
It does mean, however, that if we want more small businesses to grow, our conversation cannot focus only on whether entrepreneurs are ready for opportunity.
We also need to keep asking whether enough real opportunities are reaching businesses that are ready for them.
Perhaps the next phase of enterprise development is not about choosing between developing better entrepreneurs and creating better market access.
It is about bringing the two closer together.
We have spent years asking whether entrepreneurs are market-ready. Perhaps we now need to ask, with equal seriousness, whether our markets are entrepreneur-ready.