The City of Johannesburg municipality on Thursday officially presented its Jozi @ Work Developmental Service Delivery Model to the Council Chamber, highlighting its plan to provide small and medium enterprises (SMEs) with developmental services to alleviate unemployment in the municipality.

Johannesburg executive mayor Parks Mpho Tau said beyond service delivery challenges experienced in Johannesburg, the municipality needed to address developmental issues pertaining to employment.

“Youth unemployment continues to be a challenge in Johannesburg and is aggravated by the global economic meltdown. Massive job losses have a negative impact on the city’s residents and their ability to pay for services,” he emphasised.

Tau mentioned that, this being the case, the municipality needed to determine different ways of creating jobs through SMEs, which would be in line with its Jozi @ Work programme and would facilitate developmental growth.

In the 2014/2015 financial year starting in August, the municipality aimed to invest R1-billion in funding development through SMEs, which would serve as Phase 1 of the Jozi @ Work project. During the second phase, scheduled to run in the 2015/2016 financial year, the municipality planned to increase funding for the prgramme to R3-billion.

However, it highlighted that, in supporting development through SMEs, the municipality would partner with communities to provide improved access to development services that would ensure sustainable job creation.

Therefore, the municipality’s Jozi @ Work programme plan indicated a procurement process, in partnership with communities, to ensure sustainable growth and investment in SMEs.

The procurement process includes six steps, which would be used to evaluate the legitimacy of SMEs. These require SMEs to present a ringfence spending budget plan and business proposals to the regional forums where they are based, which will be followed by an evaluation of the SME in terms of the procurement process by the regional steering committee. Thereafter, a capability support agent will further assess the SME. An apprenticeship programme will then be conducted to ensure that the skills within the business are certified and the final decision on the SME will be made by a citywide technical task team.

“The idea behind the partnership with communities is to form corporate enterprises and [enable communities to] assume responsibility for the implementation and maintenance management of SMEs that emerge from this project. In turn, this will build institutional capacity that will support these communities by [turning them into] incubator[s] for enterprise creation and development,” Tau pointed out.