Opportunity that profit presents for South Africa

PRAVIN Gordhan told the audience at the IQbusiness Growth Conference on Friday that inclusive growth means “that everybody has a higher standard of living”. Although South Africa has experienced meaningful improvements in the reduction of poverty over the last two decades, our society still remains hugely unequal with many citizens effectively excluded from both the formal and informal economy.

By almost every metric of economic well-being – literacy, employment, per capita income – it is clear that although we have made significant strides in reducing poverty, we have failed to develop an inclusive economy in which everyone benefits equally from the wealth of the country.

Despite encouraging performance in the second quarter of this year and an end to the technical recession, the South African economy requires fundamental structural reform if we are to generate the level of growth needed to bring more people into the economy, and more importantly, to spread the benefits of that economic growth more equally among our citizens.

But, where to start? South African’s business leaders and the government need a bona fide collaboration to achieve real inclusive growth – the kind of growth Gordhan believes in.

The third iteration of the IQbusiness research study, Inclusive GROWTH.co.za, draws practical and sustainable conclusions on what inclusive growth can and should mean for ethical corporate citizens in their interactions with the government, labour and one another.

Initiatives IQbusiness has identified five critical, yet simple initiatives that advance our role in supporting inclusive growth, to grow our people, as well as the economy. We hope that this step will inspire other businesses, and even the government to create exponential strategic value and give practical substance to the theme of Inclusive GROWTH.co.za:

We call for an efficient, effective and agile government; therefore we’ve proposed to the government to adopt agile principles. We will even open up two places in every conduct of our agile training for the next 12 months to government employees directly involved in executing the National Development Plan.

When it comes to education, we will not only improve our in-house training programmes, to expand opportunities for candidates to learn within their new work environment; we will also expand our support for Partners for Possibility – the social enterprise that pairs school principals with business leaders for mutual leadership development. Our contribution to improving enterprise development will kick-off with publishing the full details of all our Enterprise Supplier Development partners on our website.

State-Owned enterprises (SOEs) are critical to South Africa’s growth. And in the pursuit of their clean bill of health, we believe that the IQbusiness-led campaign to compel SOEs to outsource internal audit will have far-reaching benefits.

And, finally, in our quest to advance financial inclusion we will actively seek to responsibly procure relevant goods and services from the informal sector, and will challenge other businesses to do the same.

These decisive actions give practical substance to our belief at IQbusiness that profit presents an opportunity to make a meaningful, positive and lasting impact on society.