Is Entrepreneurship Alive and Well in SA?

Young South Africans’ appetite for entrepreneurship is alive and well, if they are given the opportunity to turn passion into action, says the South African Institute of Chartered Accountants (SAICA). This after 900 learners participated in the 2017 SAICA & Coronation Business Development Games, held across all nine provinces over the past few months.

Playing the world-renowned Commercium board game, learners from participating schools were expected to tackle real-world business situations by assuming responsibility for the kinds of decisions business leaders have to make on a daily basis.

The following schools won their provincial games by proving that their learners have top entrepreneurial skills when their Commerciumcompanies earned the most money:

• Eastern Cape: Breidbach High School, King Williams Town
• Free State: Ntemoseng Secondary School, Botshabelo
• Gauteng: Suncrest High School, Vanderbijlpark
• KwaZulu-Natal: Menzi High School, Umlazi
• Limpopo: Mpilo Secondary School, Marulaneng
• Mpumalanga: Sitintile Secondary School, Kanyamazane
• North West: Sol Plaatje Secondary School, Mahikeng
• Northern Cape: Sekondere Skool Carlton-Van Heerden, Upington
• Western Cape: Thandokhulu Secondary School, Mowbray
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How Hard is it to “Hope” in SA?

In his best-selling book “Man’s Search for Meaning”, Austrian psychiatrist and holocaust survivor Victor Frankl describes how the smoking of cigarettes came to denote a loss of hope in concentration camp prisoners.

Given the lack of even the most basic necessities in World War 2 camps like Auschwitz which Frankl endured, cigarettes were a luxury reserved for the SS captors and the “capos” – SS appointed prisoners who headed up labour squads.

Being this scarce, cigarettes became part of camp currency and prisoners could be rewarded with a few sticks for performing especially taxing or unsavoury tasks. But the prisoners didn’t smoke the cigarettes; they would use them to buy soup or a mouthful of bread to sustain their lives. Cigarettes of themselves had no use beyond a means by which to barter for life-giving items. So, when one witnessed a fellow prisoner smoking, it was an ominous sign. You knew that all hope had been lost and it was only a matter of time.
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Good Job Done, Really Good Job

Ethical leadership has been a dominant theme both nationally and internationally in 2017.

Besides concerns around leadership and governance the stubbornly high youth unemployment rate also continues to concern South Africans.

Columba has graduated more than 6000 people from its values-based leadership programme from 160 schools to date and has an activated network of 1500 alumni (out of school).

76% of our tracked alumni have successfully transitioned into higher education, employment, micro jobbing, or volunteering.

The Columba network is a societal asset that can contribute to unlocking the economy and creating the kind of society we want to live in.
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THIS WEEK'S FAST FACT

In the open: 

In Norway, every citizen’s annual tax returns are posted online for anyone to access. The only caveat, introduced in 2014, is that viewing someone’s returns notifies them that you have done so. The number of searches logged by the tax authority was 16.5 million in the year before restrictions were put into place, while today there are around 2 million searches per year. (http://bbc.in/2BhuuEA)