Sector workshops offer solutions
Municipality engages Bay role players in bid to boost economic development
NELSON Mandela Bay Municipality’s sector participation workshops – the first of their kind to be hosted by any local municipality – have produced an innovative range of solutions aimed at dramatically improving socioeconomic conditions in the future.
The municipal initiative, according to the workshop facilitators, is directed at assisting the authority to develop a long-term socioeconomic and integrated strategic plan for the Bay. This encompasses all business, manufacturing and other economic sectors.
Workshop convener Dr Andre Parker, a business scientist associated with the University of Pretoria, said: “One of the objectives is to get this municipality run more on business lines than as a bureaucracy.”
The workshops, hosted at the Port Elizabeth City Hall this week, follow the successful Integrated Development Plan (IDP) public participation process undertaken by the authority in September and October last year. The municipality is hosting the sector workshops in a bid to consult the economic sector, and to gauge its needs to come up with an effective strategic plan.
The municipality has further described the sessions as a launchpad for economic growth initiatives from the perspective of business within Nelson Mandela Bay.
It sees the consultation process as one that will ultimately not only create a conducive environment for job creation, but which also has the potential to develop the small and medium business sector to be the drivers of the economy.
Once the process, which will include further strategic sector meetings, is complete, the municipality will publicise the outcomes and progress of the consultations.
Monday’s session was aimed at the agricultural sector, while the automotive and construction sectors, along with the green economy, were workshopped in two-hour sessions yesterday.
Sessions for the oceans economy, tourism and the services sector, among others, are planned for this week and into next week.
The methodology for the sessions – an anonymous, card-based written response to questions – is aimed at ensuring an orderly and efficient information-gathering session for the facilitators, who then give brief reportbacks to the participants around the raw data collected.
The seven questions posed to the various sectors include aspects such as current and future trends, inhibitors to their sectors, competitive advantages of doing business in their sectors in the Bay and projects or changes that should be implemented to improve the sectors in which they operate.
While participants provided a rash of positive aspects to both their sectors and doing business in Nelson Mandela Bay, a number of inhibitors, which were common across all sectors, emerged during the sessions.
These ranged from skills issues and energy costs to funding, bureaucracy, supply chain and logistics problems, the lack of collaboration within and between sectors, the maintenance of infrastructure and restrictive Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment legislation.
Among other sectors, the green economy workshop produced a number of innovative ideas and solutions, one of which was for the region’s automotive sector to diversify its operations to include “green” technologies and equipment.
The most common project participants want implemented in the Bay is the long-mooted harbour waterfront development.