Students offered business secrets

Sharing experience: Students were provided with business skills during the FNB Iketsese Entrepreneurship Seminars in May

The Black Management Forum (BMF) at UCT hosted the 2008 FNB Iketsese Entrepreneurship Seminars in May to provide students with the fundamental skills to start a business.

Students from six tertiary institutions across the Western Cape absorbed information as a wide range of speakers, from construction dealers to newspaper editors, shared their experience, secret motivations, and stories of how they cracked it in business.

The idea was to dispel the myths and uncover the truths of the deep and dark operations of South Africa's business industry, explained BMF's Dine Oliphant. The three seminars gave the students opportunities to network, and they were offered practical skills and tips to advance their business ideas.

Oliphant also talked of the value of experiential training, and of government's efforts to boost entrepreneurship.

"The problem is that South Africans have the wrong perception of entrepreneurship," Oliphant said. "Mindsets have not grasped that there is more to small entrepreneurial business than selling clothes hangers at street robots, or hawking fruit at the bus station."