Whilst it is safe to say that the biggest news coming out of South Africa at the moment concerns the FIFA World Cup, there is one piece of news from the country that most people will be unaware of - PROBE is being successfully introduced to businesses and organisations out there.
Working as part of a joint benchmarking approach, under the name of the 'UNIDO SPX Supplier Benchmarking tool', Comparison International, in collaboration with Winning Moves, is working with the United Nations Industrial Development Agency (UNIDO) to help support SME development in sub-Saharan Africa. UNIDO is a specialised agency of the United Nations. Its mandate is to promote and accelerate sustainable industrial development in developing countries and economies in transition. The project we are involved with is part of a local supplier business improvement programme that will facilitate matching local suppliers to large scale buyers in the region. Over the next three years this project will introduce PROBE to businesses in up to 20 countries across sub-Saharan Africa, the first of which was South Africa.
We recently returned from Pretoria having completed a second facilitator training course that brings the number of trained facilitators across South Africa to around 40. There are plans to run a further 3 training courses over the summer. So far, 50 small businesses have been benchmarked and this number will rise considerable as the plan is to benchmark and support over 600 businesses a year.
Later this year we are planning to train facilitators in Uganda, Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania and Kenya.
We'll keep you posted on how things are progressing with our African adventure over the coming months.
