Implications for Enterprise Development Strategy

Abstract

The central focus of this book has been on the quest to build effective strategies to support the development of enterprise on the margins, in South Africa’s mine-labour-sending areas, to create jobs and to reduce poverty. Across fourteen years and several different phases of the Mineworkers Development Agency (MDA)’s programme, in a period that also straddled South Africa’s transition to democracy, it is sobering just how marginal enterprise on the margins remained and how miserably low the returns usually were. Certainly, the ball can (and no doubt will) be thrown into our own court: in every phase, there was learning to do, mistakes made, strategic errors of omission and commission. Yet more than a decade later, surveying the field, a few things are striking. Firstly, many of the lessons we learned in this process remain very relevant to small enterprise (SE) development strategy in marginal contexts today. Secondly, it’s clear that, unique as MDA’s experience may have been, strategies promoting enterprise development in South Africa still often find it hard to achieve meaningful reductions in poverty.