The Northern Cape Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development’s adjudication team has winded-up its mammoth task of visiting 87 Female Entrepreneur projects and ended up with 49. Initially the team received 87 entries for this year’s Female Entrepreneur Awards 2017.
The significance of visiting the Female Entrepreneur projects was to ascertain how well Female Entrepreneurs know their projects, both in livestock or crop farming. It was also to get first-hand information on their daily work at their farms.
38 projects could not make it due to various reasons. Some of the reasons include failure to make entity registration, entity registration in spouse’s name, workers not registered with Department of Labour and no SARS certificates.
Initially JTG District had 28 entries, however was left with only 11 Female Entrepreneurs. Although ZF Mgcawa entered only seven, they ended up with nine, while Namakwa entered nine and ended up with five. Francis Baard tops the list with 21 contenders.
The Female Entrepreneur Awards Competition 2017 (FEA) is an annual event, striving to acknowledge the contribution of women, young women and women with disabilities in the sector through food security, job creation, economic growth and poverty alleviation. This happens through leveraging entrepreneurs from being a subsistence to commercial farmers.
Entries are in the following categories:
- Best Female Farmworker in the sector
- Best Subsistence producer
- Top Entrepreneur: Smallholder
- Top Entrepreneur: Processing
- Top Entrepreneur: Export
- Top Entrepreneur: Commercial
- MEC Special Awards
- - Youth –
- - Disabled –
After the tiring project visits, the team will now commence with the editing part. The project visits by the team is paving a way for the Department’s Female Entrepreneur Awards 2017 that will be held in Kimberley in August 2017.
Mr Phemelo Manankong –External Communications Officer @ 053 802 5622/ 071 8895 112
Directorate: Communications Services – Department of Agriculture, Land Reform and Rural Development.