Interview on Business Funding with the NYDA

Interview on Business Funding with the NYDA

YV: Please tell us who you are and what you do?
NYDA: I am Thubi Dithebe from NYDA in Bloemfontein, Free State and I am currently the coordinator for business development service in the province.

Tell us a bit more about NYDA?
NYDA is an institution which is mandated by the government of South Africa, to advance issues concerning the youth in terms of entrepreneurship, jobs, career guidance and also to encourage young people to participate in community activities. So we have different programmes to make sure that we manage to advance those activities effectively, and we have different departments that deal with those issues.

Can you tell us about the support programmes that you have?
NYDA is trying to support businesses, we give the non financial as well as the financial support. On the non financial support side we have different programmes set aside to make sure that we intensively assist young people who want to be in business. For example we have what we call a voucher programme were a young person can access a voucher through our process and then the voucher will include assisting with your business plan, business registration, financial assistant or assist with hr policies. So they are different things that we have to assist young people and for them to access that they have to go to our offices fill up the necessary application forms and the due process will follow after.

We also have entrepreneurship development programme, this is whereby we train young people in terms of the basics of business. Learning about what entrepreneurship is all about, how to conduct market research, financial management; marketing strategies and business plan so that they can have an overview of what is expected when running a business. We also have a mentorship programme were we partner with people who are already in business and have experience in a particular field so they can assist young peoples.

On financial support we have a micro finance support in which we assist young people who want to start businesses at a smaller scale, so we assist them with money from R1000 to R100000. The application for micro finance is done at our offices and they have to submit necessary documents for their application to be processed.

Do you support any kind of a business?
At the moment there are certain businesses that we not assisting financially, like primary agriculture whereby you have to deal with things like life stock or construction so they are some few businesses that we not supporting financially but we do offer them non financial support. And with some businesses we have to do a report to see whether we can support them or not.

So how can young people contact the NYDA?
They can go to their nearest NYDA branches ( Click here to view NYDA Branches) 

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