South Africa aims to create 500 000 jobs through Global Business Services by 2030

Zuko Godlimpi, Deputy Minister of Trade, Industry and Competition, while speaking at the annual Business Process Enabling South Africa (BPESA) conference in Durban on Tuesday, said that the aim of the conference is to attract international investors and bolster Global Business Services (GBS) to create 500 000 jobs by 2030.

Godlimpi said one of the values you get from bringing international investors to a conference set up is that they listen to what you say, they listen to what you've done, and they tell you what the global market is looking for. “Global investors will tell you that South Africa,  you've been doing well in this sub-sector of this industry, but these are the global trends that you should try to catch up on. The conference supports the government’s GBS Masterplan, launched in 2022, targeting 500 000 cumulative international servicing jobs by 2030,” he said.

He added that it's very useful for networking, an opportunity for us to learn global best practices. “The other thing is that it provides awareness to local communities that these opportunities exist not just for employment seeking but also for your own creation and your own innovation as a young South African endeavour.”

Godlimpi said the department must deliberate about where they take the conference to  such as major metros where there was massive unemployment, but also this problem of having output in universities of graduates and a low absorption rate.

“People need to start thinking about themselves as employment creators. “If you can use your smartphone for Facebook, TikTok, then you could potentially build a platform where you provide your expert service to a wider audience using that platform. You can even do a legal consultation platform if you're trained in law, or you could do an engineering consultation platform if you're good in engineering services, just some basic engineering things that people might need,” he said. 

South Africa can enter the global market on design capabilities. “We don't have to build bridges, but we certainly can design them, sitting where we are. So the value of this is to make people understand that the world out there is much bigger than what they understand in front of them, but also that value creation is much more sophisticated and easier these days than what it was,” Godlimpi added.

Reshni Singh, the CEO of BPESA, which is an industry association that represents the global business services sector, said global business services are not just contact centres that most people know them to be. “It's actually any IT-aided service that can be outsourced and offshored, and that includes finance and accounting, legal process, HR services, IT services, data analytics, and the list goes on. So it's quite a vast sector. And aside from just attracting jobs into South Africa for young people, we actually also attract export revenue.”

Singh said this sector was prioritised by the government back in 2007 to be able to attract work to South Africa.

“There's definitely a huge interest in South Africa. When you're looking at the global demand and the global markets, there's a demand for work in South Africa. It's been a hugely successful sector. We have a target of 500 000 jobs by 2030, meaning that we will only solve for 10% of what the size of the problem is at the moment. It's a key sector, a very critical sector in terms of making some sort of impact on unemployment in the country, ” Singh said.

BUSINESS REPORT