Just the other day news headlines stated that South Africa had hit its lowest unemployment level since 2008. Although Moody decided not to downgrade our economic status to that of junk, we’re still just two notches above.

In an effort to address these and various other concerns, JZ and his deputy Cyril Ramaphosa chaired a meeting of chief executive officers of major companies and leaders of labour unions to “discuss long and short term measures to grow the economy and create job opportunities.”

The increased partnership between the government and the private sector and social partners has been applauded by the International Monetary Fund, along with the hope that this could “speed up the implementation of reforms and support economic growth.”

Their first attribute is establishing a R10 billion fund to help stimulate economic growth through the empowerment of small business operators.

Addressing the media, Jacob outlined some of the measures to boost investor confidence:

One of these is to reduce policy uncertainty and shore up confidence in government’s ability to deliver on its promise of boosting growth. More than that, we need some concrete initiatives which ensure a turn-around in our economic fortunes.

Regarding the fund, businesses have already committed R1 billion to it:

It’s a joint private and public sector fund for Small Business Support. It will be established with roughly 50:50 contributions by the partners. The focus is to provide “venture” capital-type funding and mentoring to the target groups, especially black entrepreneurs.

While this is all an effort to raise our junk status, we have got two other rating agencies – Fitch, and Standard & Poor’s – to worry about next month.

But luckily Pravin Gordhan has expressed confidence in the country’s ability to keep it above junk status.

[source: sabc]