Community Challenge Accepted

The result of business accepting the community challenge of taking on a leadership role that would ultimately lead to many more of our youth becoming job creators, we began the process of researching, developing and testing a practical plan that would be equal to the challenge. From our perspective, the challenges of achieving a Safe, High Employment and Prosperous South Africa are huge. Apart from the GEM – Global Entrepreneur Monitor Report and the reasons why South Africa is so far behind other nations in respect of entrepreneur development and the impact this has on job creation, are a few more challenges that should strongly encourage a business and community partnership and they are:

The Dinokeng Scenarios sponsored by Old Mutual, is the result of a group of invited South Africans who developed the three future roads that will impact our future as a nation ending 2020. These three roads are referred to as the ‘Walk Apart’, ‘Walk Behind’ and ‘Walk Together’ Scenarios. The first two would be a disaster for our future with the last one being the one we should pro-actively strive to attain. More details on www.dinokengscenarios.co.za.

South African Tax Base. Only 11% of South Africans are tax payers. It is therefore not surprising that we are the world’s biggest welfare state. This is not sustainable given the small tax base.

Government must play an important role, however we are running out of time. At BBN we believe that the next 5 years will be pivotal to the future of South Africa. We can only benefit by achieving a “Dinokeng Scenario 3 Walk Together Civil Society” for our country. To achieve this, business must play a definite leadership role. In this respect BBN has made significant progress as a result of years of work.

At arriving at our plan we had to ask certain questions to arrive at the right solutions.