Johannesburg - The City of Johannesburg is mulling creating priority economic zones across the city to unlock its economic potential.
Ravi Naidoo, the city’s executive director for Economic Development and Tourism, says the main reason behind the plan is to bolster partnerships with the private sector to attract more investment.
Speaking at a session that reviewed at the ‘State of the Cities’ at the 7th Africities Summit at the Sandton Convention Centre, Naidoo said: “Attracting investment is really about how closely cities work with the private sector and other parts of the state to make cities more attractive as investment destinations.
“We are looking at how to deal with the fast tracking of processes and making land available for particular types of investment,” he said.
Johannesburg, which is an economic hub of South Africa and the region and a destination for work-seeking migrants, accounts for 14 percent of SA’s gross domestic product (GDP).
Naidoo said, over and above rolling out economic zones, the city would look at more ways of supporting entrepreneurship.
He said a recent benchmarking survey found, when it comes to supporting entrepreneurship for all the cities in Africa, Johannesburg was rated as the top city by respondents.
“There is so much activity coming here, that people want to set up businesses here. Presently, 20 percent of all the residents in the city are involved in some form of entrepreneurial activity compared to the national average of seven per cent.
“We are looking at supporting 10 000 small businesses per year from city programmes - an increase over the 5 000 we created during the last intervention by the city. We are also reviewing how state procurement can become a source for demand for small businesses,” he said.
Meanwhile, Graham Harrison, head of Micro Consulting at the Oxford University, says recent research on Foreign Direct Investment forecasts almost half of Africa’s future GDP growth through to 2030 will come from its cities. He said the study projected there will be 100 million more urban dwellers in Africa’s 100 largest cities by 2030.
Harrison noted there was already a jobs crisis in African cities because of the effects of rapid urbanisation.
While cities like Lagos and Kinshasa are expected to urbanise by 10 million each, Luanda and Dar es Salaam are projected to have five million more urban dwellers over this period.
He said, against this growth, Oxford’s Economic Department only projected a six million net increase in industry jobs, of which 4.5 million jobs are expected to come from the financial and business services sectors.
IOL
Adapted from a press release