Youth Entrepreneurs honoured at 22nd Annual SAV KICKSTART BOOST Awards

Johannesburg, South Africa, November 29,
2017- The South African Breweries (SAB) has announced the winners in its annual
SAB KickStart Boost Awards. SAB KickStart Boost is SAB’s youth entrepreneurship
development programme which has been running for the past 22 years.

The overall winner is Lebogang
Lekalakala with a prize of R500 000. Lebogang is the owner of B-MA, a business,
based in Pretoria, that services and repairs BMW and Mini Cooper vehicles that
are no longer under motor plan.

Second place in the programme
competition was awarded to Zama Buthelezi, owner of The She Creative House CC,
a vegetable farm owner that specialising in sustainable farming practices,
based in Kwa-Zulu Natal. Zama receives a R400 000 prize.

Third place was jointly awarded to Nthabiseng
Lemena, owner of clothes manufacturing business, Lemena TN Solutions (Pty) from
Welkom in the Free State and Tshepo Mdake, owner of Shangilia Boutique Spa, a
beauty and wellness business, based in Hammanskraal in Pretoria. Nthabiseng and
Tshepo share a prize of R300 000.

Cash prizes will be invested in each
business and in addition, the winners will receive further business mentorship,
looking specifically at market access opportunities within SAB and other
private and public organizations.

The winners were four of nine
finalists in the SAB KickStart Boost Programme to participate in an 18 month
long programme which offers a combination of business skills training, business
development support, mentorship, zero interest seed capital loans, and grant
funding.

The adjudication process to select the
top entrepreneurs was length and judges, which consisted of SAB leadership and
independent business mentors, had a tough decision to make. The winners were
selected based on their personal as well as commercial performance during the
programme, which included their business growth based on the capital injection,
the number of jobs created, as well as the potential and sustainability of the
businesses to grow further.

Additionally, judges took into
consideration the leadership qualities that the finalists portrayed. “It is
important to back people who will be ambassadors of the SAB KickStart programme
as their businesses reach new heights. Legonga, Zama, Nthabiseng and Tshepo
portrayed all of those qualities. We are extremely proud of them,” says
Phumzile Chifunyise, Enterprise Development Specialist, SAB and AB InBev
Africa.

This year’s SAB KickStart Boost Awards
theme was, “Fuelling the fire of youth business”. “As SAB, we believe that we
are at the very core of what youth businesses need to grow. We don’t believe in
short term interventions, and so every element that we impart into youth
businesses is an opportunity to elevate and to take youth businesses to the
next level,” says Chifunyise.

The SAB KickStart Boost finalists
underwent an intensive business skills boot camp in September 2016, and for the
remainder of 2017, they embarked on the individualised mentorship programme
that focused on personal and business development. An interactive approach was followed
to implement the development, which included business development toolkits,
templates, readings, case studies, real business challenges to solve.

SAB partnered with the Awethu Project,
a local SMME investment company, who assigned a mentor to the entrepreneurs on
a one on one and group development basis. The entrepreneurs plotted a growth
strategy that was linked to their required financial support. The mentor was
pivotal in seeing the growth strategy through alongside the entrepreneurs, and
provided technical guidance on how to best to allocate resources and grow their
businesses.

Collectively the finalists created a
total of 36 jobs – 25 permanent and 11 part-time – since being part of the SAB
KickStart Boost Programme. As a unit, the finalists employ a total of 61
employees.