The Small Business Institute (SBI) is launching a new scorecard, the SBI Index Tracker, to measure South Africa’s performance relative to other countries in terms of the ease of doing business and other metrics.
The SBI Index Tracker measures South Africa’s business environment across the start-run-grow continuum and aggregates a series of globally recognised indices.
Indices being tracked by the SBI Index Tracker, which are drawn from reliable and reputable sources, include Global Entrepreneurship; Global Entrepreneurship Monitor; Ease of Doing Business; Global Competitiveness Index; Global Innovation Index; and Corruption Perception Index.
By looking at the indices and subindices, SBI can monitor the environment for businesses at all stages of their development.
The SBI Index Tracker is available to all South Africans and economic operators on the company’s website and by request as a newsletter.
“The SBI Index Tracker is part of our ongoing efforts to improve the environment for the growth of small, medium-sized and microenterprises (SMMEs) – an important segment of every sector in our economy of which we are a voice,” says SBI executive director Bernard Swanepoel in a statement on Monday.
“And this is our modest contribution to the Thuma Mina call by President [Cyril Ramaphosa] in his State of the Nation Address in February this year,” he added.
Ramaphosa in February expressed an aspiration to see South Africa’s ranking in the World Bank’s yearly Doing Business Report improve to among the top 50 countries.
Currently, South Africa is ranked eighty-second out of 190 countries, a precipitous drop from the country’s ranking of 32 ten years ago.
“As the sixth administration begins its work this Thursday, we hope the deterioration of our performance focuses minds on the critical importance of improving our ranking as an economy,” says Swanepoel.
“Our hope is that the SBI Index Tracker will keep us all on our toes in holding all role-players to account so we can achieve the President’s aspiration and the goal of the National Development Plan to have [small businesses] contributing 90% of all new jobs by 2030.”
He notes that maintaining vigilance around, and continuously identifying, constraints to the growth of SMMEs is an important part of the SBI’s mandate.
The SBI Index Tracker will be updated on an ongoing basis.
“The SBI Index Tracker is also an expression of our commitment to fact and evidence-based policy formulation. As well as weeding out barriers to growth of SMMEs in our country, we also urge economic operators to actively participate in all the studies that measure our country’s performance,” Swanepoel states.