Lucky Shabalala and Christo Botes Business plan competition for young, aspiring entrepreneurs announced Johannesburg regional winner The 2018 SME Toolkit BUSINESS/PARTNERS Business Plan Competition for Aspiring Young Entrepreneurs has announced Lucky Shabalala as the regional winner for Johannesburg after submitting his business plan for his company, Entertainment Neighborhood - a video gaming company. Entertainment Neighborhood provides the use of video gaming facilities at R10 per hour to individuals from low-income households in the townships of Vereeniging. Shabalala started the company by using his personal gaming console which he set up outside a local hair salon. Today, Entertainment Neighborhood consists of eight PlayStation 4 consoles, eight UHD TVs, and 32 video games. “Now in its 9th year, the competition aims to promote South African entrepreneurship amongst individuals between the ages of 18 and 35, by bridging the gap between simply having an idea, to actually...

Christo Botes (BUSINESS/PARTNERS) , Freddy Sibuyi of Freddy and Sons Maintenance Engineering and Ross Boyd of General Electric South Africa Mpumalanga-based entrepreneur, Freddy Sibuyi, has been crowned the national winner in the 2017 BUSINESS/PARTNERS / SME Toolkit Global Entrepreneurship Week’s Business Plan Competition for Aspiring Young Entrepreneurs – a competition that saw hundreds of young aspiring entrepreneurs attend business planning workshops aimed at equipping them with the necessary skills and tools to turn their business idea into a reality. This year the competition – aimed at individuals between the ages of 18 and 35 – received 700 entries, and over the course of five months, 18 regional workshops focused on teaching the complexities of compiling a business plan, as well as the basics of how to run a business efficiently, were held across the country. Following each workshop, individuals were encouraged to submit their business plans for judging, and from th...

Christo Botes Opportunity for 900 young aspiring entrepreneurs to jump start their business with national free business training workshops Adding to the woes of South Africa’s unemployment rate hitting a 13-year high of 27.7%, Statistics SA’s Quarterly Labour Force Survey for the first quarter of 2017 revealed that the youth unemployment rate rose by 1.6 percentage points to 38.6%, and with the economy entering a technical recession, businesses are likely to slow expansion and hiring, further hindering the prospect of future employment. In light of these challenging circumstances, Christo Botes – executive director at Business Partners Limited (BUSINESS/PARTNERS) – says that it is now more crucial than ever before to equip South Africa’s youth with the necessary skills and knowledge to start and run their own micro or small business. “Increased unemployment among the youth is extremely worrying, as the prospect of finding employment tends to deteriorate as the period spent unemplo...