Pretoria - In an effort to empower emerging contractors, EThekwini Municipality will be hosting a workshop to equip them with technical skills to become self-sustaining entities.
The two-day Construction Indaba, which will be held at the Durban Exhibition Centre tomorrow, aims to empower emerging and established contractors to become self-sustaining entities while guiding them through the industry's most common challenges and factors that impact negatively on business growth and sustainability.
The municipality's Head of Business Support, Tourism and Markets Unit (which is hosting the event), Phillip Sithole, said the construction industry has experienced an alarming increase in the number of people joining in and registering construction companies with the hope of accessing procurement opportunities.
However, most of these companies have not even tendered for such opportunities and those that tendered have not been able to access opportunities due to various reasons, including lack of technical skills.
"Construction research conducted by eThekwini Municipality in 2008 revealed that the lack of both soft and technical skills, lack of business drive, non-compliance and lack of funds to start businesses are some of the reasons that make these companies unable to access services.
"Building and civil engineering constructions are two categories of construction that require extensive institutional learning and that these categories are catered for in all the programmes that support contractors, the Business Support, Tourism and Markets Unit decided to assist the third category, which is specialised trade contractors," Sithole explained.
He also noted that most of the contractors are on the Construction Industry Development Board (CIDB) level one and struggle to upgrade to CIDB level two and above in order to benefit from the programmes offered by many government departments.
