Document: Umjindi Municipality: LED Strategy 2010-2013

In South Africa, Local Economic Development (LED) has become the panacea for overcoming the numerous barriers and market failures that local entrepreneurs face on a daily basis and that are root causes for high unemployment, low income and thus widespread poverty. However, tackling the multiple obstacles to local economic growth such as low skills level, a lack of entrepreneurial culture, inappropriate or weak support mechanism, lack of access to financial and business development services and spatial marginalization in not an easy task, and many conventional LED approaches that have been applied in South Africa have not proven to show the desired effects so far.

As its been alluded earlier that Umjindi has a large number of stable labour force of semi and unskilled workers, it is therefore important for our organization to streamline HIV/AIDS in our LED Strategy hence the virus has a major negative impact on our labour force.
We’ve also taken the matter into our hands of developing young entrepreneurs for job creation and economic growth of Umjindi. The Municipality has also developed an Investment Prospectus document aiming to identify sectoral programmes that could be used as a basis for pro-active economic development initiatives.