A Rwandan national who has lived in South Africa for nearly two decades has started a smart technology company aimed at bridging the gap between big businesses and vendors in the country.
Jacque Sibomana, who has won multiple awards after launching his online business in February 2017, came to South Africa in 1999 as a refugee after his family was affected by the 1994 genocide.
He told News24 that his new project - Kuba - was aimed at empowering small business owners and linking them with big businesses through various services.
"The platform went live in February 2017 as a pilot project in the Western Cape. Between February and May, we received support from 60 small business owners, with 23 Jobs being created on the platform," said Sibomana.
He said his company was assisting black small service providers to register their companies, register with the South African Revenue Services (SARS), as well as to draft professional invoices.
"Kuba has gained support from SUSNET as well as programmes being run under both the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business as well as Stellenbosch University," said Sibomana.
Sibomana said his dream was to make an impact on ordinary black small business owners who would have ordinarily not been exposed to opportunities.
Access to information
"We are a small business ourselves. We just started recently and have already won a number of awards. We want to see Kuba as the first step for small businesses, and for me I don’t want to see other small business owners going through what we went through" he said.
He said he started his company after working in the corporate sector for a while, but realised that the government was just throwing money at informal businesses without properly training upcoming business owners.
Sibomana said that the lack of access to information was another major factor that hampered the success of small businesses. He hoped to change this through his company.
He said that at least over 200 small business had access to Kuba and were benefiting from various value added products.
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