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Activity 1:
To discuss the value of entrepreneurship for the community, and generate business ideas by means of a SWOT analysis
[LO 4.5, 4.1]
Read the following report from Die Burger of 5 July 2003 about the efforts of an entrepreneur in Cape Town:
A LONG WIRE FROM POVERTY TO A BETTER LIFE
Nellie Brand
Mr Unite Chimbadzo has come a far way from the streets of Johannesburg and Cape Town to the showroom in a building in Kloof Street where interesting wire art can be seen through dusty windowpanes.
On Tuesday evening his wire art took pride of place at the dazzling rugby dinner of the new Springbok team in the Cape Town international conference centre that was held to raise money for injured rugby players.
It is in the showroom and workshop in 8 Kloof Street where Loxionwires , the close corporation which was established by him and five other artists, is run. Previously their wire ornaments were made and displayed in the city streets.
He made 60 wire balls for the Springbok dinner, and this is the kind of order that the close corporation would like to get more of.
According to him they established Loxionwires so that they would be able to get larger projects. “We want to give our clients the confidence to place orders with us. If we keep on working in the streets we will never get big orders,” he says.
He has an intense desire to train other unemployed people and to save them from the morass of poverty, crime and drugs – a commonplace phenomenon in Khayelitsha where he lives. He says that the decision to establish the close corporation was driven by this desire.
The name of the concern is pronounced in the way that the ordinary township people say “location” – “the dwelling-place of those for whom we want to create work,” he says.
At present Loxionwires employs 42 people.
He says unemployed people are trained to ensure that the day they get a big order, they will be able to produce high quality products which will satisfy their clients.
He expects that business will improve towards the end of the year when they will be making wire Christmas trees.
He talks about unemployed young people who turn to crime in order to survive.
“It isn’t safe for me to be the only one in my township who goes home at night with money in my pocket,” he says. “I know that I will encounter danger somewhere along the way.”
He hopes that his example will convince such people that there are other ways of earning an income. “If I can do it, others can too. All I use is my hands and my brains to make an ornament that will sell and on which I won’t make a loss,” he says.
It has taken him 10 years since he came to South Africa from Zimbabwe in search of a better life to earn a reasonably fixed stream of income from his craft.
As a 19-year-old who had passed matric with five distinctions – amongst others in maths and science – but who was unable to get a fixed job since 1993, he saw how people in Johannesburg were able to survive on their earnings from wire art.
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