South Africa’s women entrepreneurs took centre stage at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange in Sandton on Friday, where the Womanpreneur Pitch & Match 2026 connected founders to capital, markets, investors and supply chains, and government spelled out a growing toolkit of support built to help women-owned businesses scale.
Delivering the keynote address, Minister for Women, Youth and Persons with Disabilities Sindisiwe Chikunga said the event has evolved from a competition into “a genuine instrument of economic transformation”.
“Women’s economic empowerment is not only a matter of social justice; it is a growth and development strategy,” Chikunga told the gathering.
Real money is already moving
The minister pointed to a string of concrete interventions that are shifting resources towards women-led enterprise:
- Preferential procurement policy now requires at least 40 percent of public procurement opportunities to benefit women-owned and other designated enterprises.
- Close to 6 000 women-owned businesses have been trained by government to bid for and win state contracts, with departments required to monitor and report on women’s participation in every procurement process.
- The R897 million Imbali For Her blended finance programme, launched in May by the Department of Small Business Development and the Small Enterprise Development and Finance Agency (SEDFA), offers up to R5 million per applicant, with grant portions of 40 percent for able-bodied women and 50 percent for women with disabilities.
Imbali For Her is expected to support close to 975 women-owned businesses and sustain about 2 250 jobs over three years. “SEDFA has already disbursed R454 million to women-owned businesses in a single quarter and has reached almost half a million women beneficiaries over the past three years,” Chikunga said.
From marching for dignity to building wealth
The minister linked the JSE gathering to a year of powerful anniversaries: 70 years since the 1956 Women’s March, 50 years since the 1976 Youth Uprisings and 30 years of the Constitution.
“The women of 1956 marched for dignity, the youth of 1976 rose for opportunity, and the Constitution enshrined dignity, equality and non-sexism as foundations of our democracy. Today, our task is to translate those victories into economic inclusion,” she said.
Turning commitments into jobs
Chikunga urged development finance institutions and private-sector partners to keep the momentum going by converting pledges into funding that lands in women’s businesses. “Commitments and approvals are not disbursements, and disbursements are not yet jobs,” she reminded partners.
The vision, she said, is a South Africa where every woman with a viable business idea can access the capital, markets, networks and opportunities required to grow, and where platforms like Womanpreneur Pitch & Match keep opening doors on the continent’s biggest stock exchange.
Source: SAnews.gov.za
Photo: commons.wikimedia.org
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