While progress has been made in supporting small enterprises, challenges remain around recognizing diversity among small businesses, improving access to support services in rural areas, and addressing structural issues like access to finance for black entrepreneurs. A review identified issues like lack of coordination between support providers, inadequate representation of small business interests, differences in support absorption across regions, and insufficient monitoring and evaluation of support programs.

1. 4. Remaining challenges
While a great deal of progress has been made in government’s efforts to promote small
enterprises, some important challenges are still to be resolved.
The Review of Ten Years of Small Business Support in South Africa 1994 to 2004 identifies the
following issues that need attention:
• The great diversity of small enterprises and their needs requires greater recognition
• Far more knowledge and understanding is required across the full range of support
suppliers and the support each one provides, as well as to whom and under what
conditions
• Access to support services must be comparable in urban/metropolitan and rural areas.
• Greater balance is required between the cost, reach and impact of support interventions,
in particular, where public funds are concerned
• Many support programmes only tackle the symptoms of deeper-lying problems, thereby
preventing a more systematic approach to those structural issues (e.g. access to finance
for black entrepreneurs)
• Lack of clarity about the roles and responsibilities of different levels of the public sector
makes their efforts uncoordinated and less effective
• Inadequate representation of particular small-enterprise interest groups in existing or
evolving business associations weakens feedback on specific needs
• Substantive differences still exist in the capacity to absorb small-enterprise support
programmes in the different provinces and regions of the country and in different sectors
• There is insufficient interaction between small enterprise support programmes and other
thrusts of the Government’s socio-economic development support
• The Centre for the Promotion of Small Business (the dti chief directorate) has been
unable to co-ordinate all the support programmes developed by different national
government departments
• Thorough and regular monitoring and evaluation of the evolving support processes has
been inadequate.