A week ago, President Cyril Ramaphosa launched the Tourism Equity Fund – a public-private partnership initiative – to shore up transformation and diversity in the capital-intensive tourism and associated industries. The fund, which has been seeded with R540m to be managed by the Small Enterprise Finance Agency, seeks to “accelerate the quantitative and qualitative increase in participation by black entrepreneurs” especially youth and women-owned firms and co-operatives.

When launching this long-overdue initiative, which is expected to be grown to R1.2bn with contributions from the commercial banks over a three-year period, Ramaphosa said: “The task before us now is to ensure we do not simply return to business as usual, but that we focus on accelerating the pace towards our transformation goals.”..