Cape Town – Small emerging businesses will be given a leg up with the City of Cape Town’s initiative to give them a chance to gain the necessary experience and to grow their financial standing.
This will help them to compete for bigger, more technical projects when the time comes, mayoral committee member for finance Johan van der Merwe said.
The city’s community-based supplier programme, which applied to bids of less than R30 000, aimed to establish less onerous requirements in the procurement process. Strong oversight over the spending of public money on goods and services would still apply, he said.
The city expected this initiative to make a positive contribution to job creation. The city had established a central supplier database (CSD) walk-in centre at its Cape Town Civic Centre offices which helped potential suppliers interested in registering. Vendors could visit the walk-in centre for more information.
Van der Merwe said a community-based project referred to bids for goods and services allocated in a specific ward. Subcouncil managers would identify and confirm the locality and domicile of all community-based suppliers within their jurisdiction and invite them to submit their application to become vendors. These vendors were verified on the master supplier database maintained by the supply chain management department.
It was foreseen that procurement of general services, such as area cleaning, general maintenance, laundry services, waste removal, and the provision of hygienic services and other general services would be especially suitable to these emerging micro-enterprises.
Examples of such bids already included a maintenance service provider being used in First Avenue Park in Lotus River and a cleaning contract in parks in Nyanga.
“These types of service are generally labour-intensive and our supply chain management process will therefore also assist with the targeting of local labour. Mostly, qualified industry specialists will not be required for these specific tenders and the turnaround times on the awarding of these tenders will be improved,” he said.
“In addition, the costs of materials (such as cleaning materials and black bags) and of leasing the standard equipment required for such projects (such as lawnmowers, spades, mops, and brooms) are minimal and generally require no large capital outlay from the local suppliers.
“We have been looking at how we can assist such small emerging businesses to develop and to gain experience so that they are equipped on all levels to one day tender for larger projects. So often smaller suppliers fold under the financial, legislative, and management pressure. They go bust and the workers who they employ lose all support too.
“This community-based supplier initiative is a tangible example of our new organisational development and transformation plan (ODTP) which entails removing some of the operational silos and red tape that often characterise government operations and finding ways of igniting hope by enabling opportunities and services in a more localised, area-based manner.
“We are able to move into this direction as we already have a strong supply chain management centre of excellence from which to work. We have the basics in place to take delivery and empowerment to the next level,” Van der Merwe said.