Lane Mogashoa, Business Development Support -Enterprise Development, Absa Business Banking
When Chantelle de Bruyn’s grandfather had to give up coffee for health reasons, she wondered whether she could create something that would still give him the experience of having a cup. She found a peculiar answer in butternut, although turning that idea into a product people would actually drink took far more than inspiration.
The Free State entrepreneur registered Buttercup Farmhouse in 2019, completed short online courses in biochemistry and approached the University of the Free State’s Food Science Lab for help. Over the next three years, the product was tested and refined until it was ready for market and, by 2024, the coffee alternative that had started with one person’s health challenge had found its way onto the shelves of major retailers.
De Bruyn credits part of that progress to the funding and mentorship she received along the way, which helped her scale the business, enter new markets and build a stronger understanding of financial management. Through Absa, she received a business development grant and access to a lending facility, along with opportunities to showcase her products at Lemo Fest and on the Proudly South African platform. This exposure helped her reach wider markets, supported by marketing assistance and broader business development support.
Her experience points to something that is missed in the conversation about SME development more broadly. Capital matters, but every growing business also depends on the capability to use it well and a clear route into the market. For women entrepreneurs, access to that wider business ecosystem is often less equal, which means funding alone may leave many of the barriers to growth untouched.
According to the Small Business Growth Index, South Africa’s first real-time barometer of the conditions shaping small business performance, only 38% of businesses surveyed in 2025 believed they could survive for more than a year under sustained cost pressure without external support. There is clearly a funding gap, because small businesses account for much of the country’s entrepreneurial activity and need capital if they are to grow into larger, more productive enterprises. But funding is still treated as the end point, when in reality it is only one half of the problem, especially for women-owned businesses trying to move from survival into sustained growth.
The way we think about SME development for women-owned enterprises needs to become more holistic.
A business can receive funding and still struggle because the owner does not yet have the systems or commercial relationships needed to use that capital well. We see versions of this with clients all the time at Absa. An entrepreneur may have a strong product and a growing customer base, but the business records are still mixed with personal finances, invoices are not followed up consistently, and the owner does not have a clear view of what the business earns after costs. A lender looking at that business sees uncertainty, even where the underlying enterprise has real potential.
Research in South Africa has also found that women entrepreneurs face weaker market linkages and are concentrated in sectors where businesses tend to be smaller, which affects the type of finance they can access and the pace at which they can grow. Programmes that combine finance with ongoing mentorship and a real route into the market have been shown to achieve better results than support offered in isolation, which is why South Africa needs more initiatives that stay with the entrepreneur as the business develops. The strongest programmes work alongside the business long enough to help the owner understand what is holding it back, fix that problem and then move with greater confidence into the next stage of growth.
Market access is particularly important because a business cannot train its way around the absence of customers. This is where large companies and public institutions can make a direct difference by giving women-owned SMEs a realistic route into their supply chains and then helping them understand what is required to remain there.
One such example is an Enterprise Development Programme developed through a partnership between Absa and SME incubator MyDough. It is designed to support 100 South African entrepreneurs, especially women, through business development support, mentorship and coaching, creating market access opportunities and providing support towards funding readiness and access to funding.
Initiatives like these do not reduce the urgency of closing the funding gap, but they do change what successful funding should look like. The aim is to help more women-owned businesses reach the point where they can take on capital and turn it into sustained growth. That will require finance and business development to be treated as part of the same journey, because that is how the entrepreneur experiences them.
