Endeavor South Africa
Dream Big. Scale Up. Pay it forwards.
October 2021 Newsletter
Dear Friends of Endeavor,
Endeavor South Africa has been in the news, and we’re keen to share some of the recent coverage focussing on the importance of high-impact entrepreneurs in driving inclusive growth in South Africa. Great to see this positive message is resonating.
We want to continue to have a leading voice around the role of these high-growth scale-ups in driving job creation and economic growth alongside SiModisa, The SA SME Fund, the JSE, SAVCA, all who are sharing similar messages. Endeavor board members Vukani Mngxati and Melvyn Lubega, and Managing Director Alison Collier, tackled different aspects of this issue enabling us to bring to light solutions to the existing legislative barriers as well as potential accelerators for the sector.
High-growth, scalable innovators create jobs
Business Day covered an Endeavor SA opinion piece, highlighting the success of the Endeavor Entrepreneurs and the positive contribution these high-growth tech scale-ups have towards SA’s economy — delivering strong revenue, job growth and capital raising despite covid. This good news story is resonating, Daily Maverick published a similar opinion piece from Endeavor SA over the weekend as did Startup Africa and Africa.com.
The shortage of key digital skills is holding South Africa back
Vukani Mngxati, Accenture Africa CEO and Endeavor Board member, shared the important need for digital skills in South Africa in an article entitled ‘Digital adopters are economy agnostic and growing at 80% annually’. This story was shared across a few channels including Africa.com, BizCommunity, Futurewave and Michael Avery’s Businesstalk show, airing shortly.
Creating an enabling environment for entrepreneurship through legislation
The South Africa Tech Start Up community are working together to lobby for a more enabling policy environment for high-growth entrepreneurs. The group published a draft position paper in September 2021 proposing policy amendments, in parallel to developing a Start-Up Act. The community includes SiMODiSA (Secretariat), Endeavor’s i4Policy, Silicon Cape, SAVCA, Loudhailer, The Digital Collective Africa amongst others. An editorial entitled “Start-Up Act would help kick-start job creation” appeared in the Business Day in early October and opened the conversation about promulgating a viable Start-Up Act to unleash innovation and go some way to meet the objectives of a tech-led economy. This piece was syndicated and even ended up on a news site in Palo Alto
The Mail & Guardian also published an opinion piece by Melvyn Lubega, co-founder Go1 and Endeavor Entrepreneur, highlighting the importance of creating an enabling environment for the tech start-up sector by focusing on removing red tape to ensure that South Africa can be globally competitive and attract foreign VC investment. Melvyn had follow up interviews on KayaBiz (Gugulethu Mfuphi) and SAFM (Simon Brown)– we’d encourage you to listen here.
Looking forward to continuing these discussions into last quarter of 2021 and beyond. And, as always, thank you for your input on these important topics, enabling us to keep the positive momentum going
Kind regards,
Alison Collier
Managing Director: Endeavor South Africa
