Green Economy and SMEs in South Africa: How Green are South African SMEs?

Abstract

The setting up of intellectual property support platform in South Africa has been intended to stimulate the development of technology-based services, products, enterprises, and encouraging investment. This initiative is at the heart of the South African National Development Plan (NDP) of 2030. Again, green technology has become a necessity in modern society that in the absence of adequate knowledge will weigh at the expense of any economic objective of any scale to achieve. Green economy has been seen as a great opportunity to boost the global economy and South Africa sees the necessity not to delay to involve its society and already has set targets for 2020 and beyond in the transformation of the natural resource reserves at disposal. A successful South African green economy development would profit the sub-Saharan region and reciprocally, the region would be of an ultimate prospect to benefit the country assuming its position of the regional hub. With this in mind the paper intends to review how possible can an adjustment of SMMEs to green economy occur. SMMEs are the engine of the global economy and the South African economic development aim is a shift to high-value, knowledge-intensive products. The objective of the paper is a conceptual framework and it is based on secondary data collected from government reports, books, internet, archives and current journals, and online publications.

DOI: 10.5901/ajis.2014.v3n6p181