Gloria Serobe, co-founder and CEO of women's investment group Wiphold, says a patriarchal culture, dysfunctional municipalities, red tape and lack of security of tenure are hindering the empowerment of black women and crippling rural development.
“When you talk about broad-based BEE these are the things you should be talking about,” says Serobe, who was recently appointed to the president’s advisory panel on B-BBEE.
B-BBEE for her means enabling black women entrepreneurs who are being disempowered by “a patriarchal mindset” in boardrooms and discriminated against by credit committees, which make it hard for them to get finance.
“If you are a bright female graduate and you get into these male-dominated areas your brightness might count for less because your networks and acceptability are limited by patriarchal mindsets and tendencies.”
Serobe, who sat on the Nedbank board for 12 years and headed its transformation committee, says she understands that bank credit committees have to comply with the National Credit Act, “but we have to make these processes more sympathetic to the particular hardships of black women entrepreneurs”.
“The banking system is not very friendly to black women in the entrepreneurial space.”
She is particularly disturbed by the failure of the government's B-BBEE policy to empower black women in rural areas.
“Black women entrepreneurs are hugely important to the development of rural areas, but they are much worse off than black women entrepreneurs in urban areas.”
The main cause of their disempowerment is the failure of the government to give them security of tenure.
“Without titles to their homes or land they can give no security to anyone. So without a funder who believes in them they don’t have a chance to start or run their own small businesses.”
As a result, thousands of opportunities are going begging, which she believes could have a huge impact on the rural economy.
There are vast tracts of land that cannot be worked on because the people living on them, mostly women, don’t have security of tenure
— Gloria Serobe
“They should be included in the government's land reform programme in terms of being given ownership of homes and land. There are vast tracts of land that cannot be worked on because the people living on them, mostly women, don’t have security of tenure.”
Wiphold has been running a maize project in the Eastern Cape for women on 2,800ha of rural, communal land for which they have no title, no security of tenure and not even lease agreements.
They now have a storage facility financed by agricultural services company Afgri, which also helps them operate it, where local entrepreneurs can store up to 15,000t of maize and sell it when the price is right.
They use their silo receipts to raise money from commercial banks, expand their operations and employ more people.
“It's a major game-changer for them, but giving them security of tenure would be even more of a game-changer,” says Serobe.
B-BBEE is also about improving service delivery, which means fixing municipalities.
“There's no water, there are no sewerage systems, there are telecommunication issues. The service backlogs are devastating in rural areas,” she says.
“To eradicate them you need aggressive municipal management that means well and does things yesterday. As things stand, people living in these areas trying to start and run businesses are in for a hiding.
“This goes to the heart of B-BBEE in rural areas.”
The advisory panel on B-BBEE will have to talk about what makes it hard for entrepreneurs in rural areas, she says.
Central to their disempowerment are broken municipalities that don't provide the basic services entrepreneurs need to be competitive.
“What makes it even more mind-boggling is when money is returned to National Treasury at the end of the financial year because they don't have the capacity to implement,” she says.
What urgently needs to be addressed is the interface between different parts of the government to make B-BBEE work for entrepreneurs who are based in these rural areas.
Serobe is “quite excited” about the government’s district development model, “but for this to work government departments must be cohesive, they must talk to each other. So that if you’re building a school there are toilets for that school, there are roads and bridges so that pupils don't have to swim across rivers any more.”
Also hindering B-BBEE in rural areas is excessive red tape and bureaucracy, she says.
“There is just too much of that. Just to get things on board, just to register a small business, you have to travel to such-and-such an office in such-and-such a town. By the time you are registered you’ve had to spend so much money and time, more than your counterparts in urban areas. The bureaucracy is the same but access to that bureaucracy in rural areas is costly.”
Many rural entrepreneurs don't have much formal education, which makes compliance with all the regulations more difficult.
The opportunities for providing services in rural areas are huge, and there are women who are capable of doing these things
“That means the attitude of bureaucrats must be that of helping them to comply. They don't require a huge education to succeed as rural entrepreneurs, they need a more supportive attitude.”
She says there are hundreds of thousands of black entrepreneurs in rural areas, mostly women, who have the potential to innovate and start small businesses and run them if they had the right support.
“The opportunities for providing services in rural areas are huge, and there are women who are capable of doing these things.”
She says more private-sector investment is also key to the success of small businesses but will only happen if municipalities provide a conducive environment.
“The environment is not conducive.”
In all these ways, the cause of B-BBEE is not being well served, she says. As she sees it, these are issues the advisory panel will have to address because they're holding back B-BBEE.
“B-BBEE has in it all these things. So when you talk about B-BBEE these are the things you have to talk about. How to open these opportunities for entrepreneurs. Because B-BBEE is about empowering black entrepreneurs to take advantage of these opportunities, it's about building the economy in an inclusive way.
“We [on the advisory panel] need to elevate these matters up.”
