The Department of Trade and Industry (the dti) Interview on Entrepreneurship
Q: What is the DTI?
A: The DTI is one of government department and it deals with economic development and trade and also a number other issues around economic development.
Q: What is entrepreneurship?
A: This includes activities that are geared towards stimulating businesses, people establishing their own businesses that will stimulate the economy. In short it means activities that lead people to establish their own businesses.
Q: Why is entrepreneurship needed in South Africa?
A: Entrepreneurship or small business development is the driver of the economy in every developing economy. Entrepreneurship is one of those elements that drive economic growth.
Q: What has been some of the constraining factors to the interest in entrepreneurship within SA , most notably battling communities?
A: The most important constraining factor is communication, although some may argue that it is finance. We have found that especially in remote areas people don’t access appropriate information to be able to redirect their ideas into some sort of business. People need to get business development skills first.
Q: Apart from contacting and getting information from the DTI, what other structures are available?
A: There are Local Economic Development (LED) structures at the municipal level. The DTI also has information centres in almost every part of municipalities.
Q: What role has the DTI been playing to promote entrepreneurs in communities around SA?
A: We have built a massive structure wherein we developed a small enterprise development agency (seda) network and we have offices at municipalities and district municipalities which provide a lot of services
Q: Please elaborate further more on business registration and how does it benefit to have your company registered?
A: Every potential funder would want to know whether your business is formalized or not. South African Revenue Service (SARS) is also able to monitor in terms of taxation issues and there are also businesses that access market through government therefore to bag into this market one must be registered. We have integrated business registration services at our offices.
