The Local Business Service Centre (LBSC) programme launched by the government of the Republic of South Africa in 1995 to provide business development services to small business, moreso in the Black communities, did not live up to expectations. This is according to the responses of a sample of 400 small business owners who were researched regarding the effectiveness of the LBSC programme, with a usable questionnaire response rate of 37.8%. The purpose of this ex post facto research, conducted in 2006 and 2007, was to evaluate the impact of the LBSC programme on small businesses in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. The results will assist in developing strategies for the delivery of business development services (BDSs) that would meet the expectations of all stakeholders. This is the challenge facing South Africa. The better-known service centres include the Small Business Development Centres in the United States of America and Business Link in the United Kingdom of Great Britain; and international brands like the Enterprise Development Centres sponsored by the International Labour Organisation. These centres provide business development services such as information, basic management training and referrals to more advanced services. The quantitative research was based on a questionnaire consisting of 42 variables and one open-ended question. The questionnaire was sent to 400 small business owners who had received counselling from the LBSCs. The questionnaire was developed from a literature review on service centres in the developed and developing world; the qualitative studies of Bloch&Daze in 2000 and Urban-Econ in 2002 which were conducted nationally, and structured qualitative interviews with former government officials and existing LBSC owners. The open-ended question solicited respondents to specify the type of service centre that would meet their requirements. According to the four-point Likert scale used, most respondents “disagree” that the LBSCs were effective, and the rating was just shy of the 2.5 median. Three factors emerged from the responses: “capacity and professionalism”; “productive relationship” and “empowering association”. According to a t-test and an analysis of variance (Anova), there was no statistical difference between the means and mid-points of the independent variables for the three factors which indicated “disagree”, except “capacity and professionalism” and “empowering association” in terms of turnover. The independent variables included the age of the SMME owner, the qualifications of the owner, the turnover, the number of employees and the age of the entity. The researcher has recommended an eight-point SMME development strategy as the basis to introduce a new generation of service centres to stimulate entrepreneurship and provide business development services. The recommended eight-point strategy will also assist to assess new business development services centres being introduced by various governments. / Thesis (DCom)--University of Pretoria, 2010. / Business Management / unrestricted

This thesis is about the quest to build effective strategies to support the development of enterprise on the margins of the economy, to create jobs and reduce poverty. A core part of this challenge includes grappling with the role of markets in development, and of markets as a critical part of the context in which enterprise development in rural and peri-urban areas can either provide a path out of poverty – or instead serve to lock people into poverty. The thesis explores these issues by tracking the experience of the Mineworkers Development Agency (MDA) as it attempted to grapple with this challenge. MDA is the development wing of South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers (NUM) , and was set up to create jobs and support enterprise development for communities affected by the loss of jobs on the mines. The thesis covers a fourteen-year period in MDA’s history, from its inception in 1988 until 2002. It tracks the learning process across several phases in the development of MDA’s approach. These included the development of worker co-operatives, the establishment of business service centres, value-chain work in the craft sector, and the commercialization of a juice product from the indigenous marula berry. In the process, MDA engaged with an emergent paradigm in the development sector called ‘Making Markets Work for the Poor’. Can markets really be made to work for the poor? Or even just made to work ‘better’ for the poor? Or is the process of inclusion in markets inexorably and inevitably one of making the poor work for markets? The thesis explores these issues in the context of MDA’s experience, locating this within a wider set of theoretical concerns over the role of markets in society, and the ways in which societies have protected themselves from the negative impacts of the development of market economies. It draws on wider political economy approaches to argue that markets are institutions that are socially constructed, and explores what scope there might therefore be to construct them differently. While recognising the importance of social protection, the thesis argues that there is a need to go beyond defensive strategies aimed at protecting society from markets, to identify new terms of engagement within markets to shape markets, and to harness their wealth-creating potential in ways that have different distributional consequences, as part of a long-term agenda of eradicating poverty.