Bridgit Evans, executive director of the South African Breweries (SAB) Foundation, is calling for a central database of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in SA that can be used by both public and private sector players to find, fund and support what many consider to be the country’s economic engine.
In 2025, funding for the South African small business sector remains a complex landscape marked by high demand but limited access, especially for microenterprises and women-owned businesses.
While most MSMEs seek modest developmental funding — often under R1m — for working capital or equipment, outdated credit scoring models and lack of formal documentation hinder approvals.
Making entrepreneurs investment-ready
According to Evans, small businesses in SA are facing tremendous odds to access finance, often held back by high compliance barriers, costs and a lack of formal financial record-keeping.
“It’s expensive to comply, but one of the biggest barriers is that as a country, we are failing to make entrepreneurs investment-ready,” she says.
“The funding is there, but there is a disconnect. We need to ask ourselves what we can do to change that, because that’s where the job creation potential lies. It’s when MSMEs grow that they create jobs. The whole country has a strong narrative about them being the job creators of the future, but if we don’t solve this ongoing financing issue, then their ability to create jobs will always be limited.”
The SAB Foundation is an independent trust established by the SAB in 2010 to drive economic and social empowerment for historically disadvantaged South Africans. It primarily achieves this by fostering entrepreneurship through various programmes that provide funding, business development support, mentorship, and market access to MSMEs and social innovators.
The foundation has a specific focus on empowering women, youth, individuals living in rural areas, and people with disabilities, aiming to build sustainable businesses that create jobs, address social challenges, and contribute to community development across SA.
Through its work with thousands of entrepreneurs over many years, Evans and her team have become increasingly concerned about the financing gap in SA.
Evans points to FinFind’s 2025 South African MSME Access to Finance Report to illustrate just how concerning the situation really is. According to this report:
- MSMEs are the backbone of the country’s economy, accounting for 40% of GDP and employing more than 60% of the nation’s workforce.
- MSMEs make up the largest portion of formal business activity in the country, over 91% of all registered entities.
- Formal microbusinesses — those registered with a turnover of less than R1m per annum — account for 86.5% of the total number of MSMEs applying for funding, meaning they create the majority of jobs (80.5%), “yet are the most underserved”.
The report — supported by the SAB Foundation, Experian SA and the National Financial Literacy Association among others — is based on a study analysing a sample of more than 10,000 MSME business funding requests.
A key finding is that the MSME funding gap is large, estimated at R350bn, with the report’s authors concluding that the MSME sector is currently not growing significantly, nor making the meaningful contribution that is needed to the economy. As such, “increased and improved access to funding is imperative to ensure the growth of this vital sector and the economy at large”.
Increased and improved access to funding is imperative to ensure the growth of [the vital MSME] sector and the economy at large
— FinFind’s 2025 South African MSME Access to Finance Report
The report also finds a high demand for finance for start-ups and early-stage businesses, but very little supply. Finance for start-ups does not feature in the top 10 finance product offerings from funders.
In addition, the lack of funding readiness is one of the primary challenges for MSMEs applying for funding, as Evans had pointed out. “And that for me is where the job creation conundrum lies,” she says.
With only 24% of businesses keeping proper financial accounting records, Evans explains that many entrepreneurs will never have access to formal financial markets, yet the funding is available.
“When we started lending two and a half years ago through the launch of our Financing For Impact Programme, we realised that even after graduating from our programmes, which contain lots of financial training, it doesn’t change the behaviour [of small business owners] at all,” she says.
Entrepreneurs don’t change their behaviour. And so the question is, why?
“I think it’s very multifaceted. There are cultural issues. There’s fear. There’s the fact that they’re just focusing on sales. Because when they’re selling, they know that the business is moving. So they focus on the comfortable side and that’s the selling side. No lender is going to lend without evidence of your performance, and that comes down to numbers,” says Evans.
The database
Evans, who has been leading the SAB Foundation for more than a decade, makes the case for creating a central repository that can be used by both public and private sector funders looking to back small businesses.
Such a database would contain relevant information such as updated financial records, number of employees, line of business, industry, and years in business that funders can use to find or verify possible candidates.
Even then, she is concerned about the general lack of record-keeping in the sector and the effort it takes to rectify this.
“In our case, we’ve had to build financial records with entrepreneurs from scratch based on the information we have on hand, look at the future contracts they have in their pipeline, work intensively with them to give them a loan, and then guide them through that loan process,” she says.
Such an exercise can be expensive, alluding to why many business owners choose not to do so.
Unfortunately, “the only people who do offer finance to these kinds of businesses do it at very high interest rates, often exceeding 30%. This also traps entrepreneurs into a debt cycle that they can’t trade out of”.
Evans says there are simple solutions that can be put in place, “but it needs a national commitment because our enterprise and supplier development programmes clearly are not doing what they were intended to do if business owners are graduating, still financially illiterate, and not investment-ready”.
The other issue is about impact measurement and tracking.
Government has spent years trying to find effective ways to support MSME growth. It’s something that seems to have been passed on to the private sector in recent years, with BEE legislation mandating large corporate entities to support small businesses.
Partly as a result, business development support — interventions to help start-ups structure, scale and fund their operations — has become an estimated R20bn industry.
“Without the tracking, we really don’t know whether you’ve made an impact. And for the amount of investment going in nationally, we have to know. And there’s no shame in saying: we tried this, it didn’t really work. And then you change it,” says Evans.
She highlights an unwillingness by business development service (BDS) providers and other players to share information with the broader ecosystem. Such sharing would help to boost accountability in the space, and allow all to learn valuable lessons about what works and what doesn’t.
We need financial literacy training that changes behaviour as well as lending models that use blended funding to prioritise job creation as opposed to just return on investment
— Bridgit Evans, executive director of the SAB Foundation
Set up in 2012, Catalyst for Growth is an institution looking to address this gap. The NPO based in Johannesburg was created by JPMorgan, Dalberg and USAID and developed an analytics platform for BDS providers.
“There were these three firms who set this up recognising the importance of building a central repository of information on entrepreneurs from ESD providers,” says Evans.
“They funded it initially, and we put some funding into it as well. It eventually fizzled out because no one wanted to share that information. And I think part of the reason for this is that no one was collecting it.
“As a country, we need to learn from our mistakes and we all need to play our part in accelerating job creation. We’ve individually learnt so many lessons about what works and what doesn’t, but without sharing them, we are not going to move the needle.
“We need financial literacy training that changes behaviour and lending models that use blended funding to prioritise job creation as opposed to just return on investment. We need this to ensure genuine, inclusive growth.”
This article was sponsored by SAB Foundation.
