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2 David Fine, Julia Klier, Deepa Mahajan, Nico Raabe, Jörg Schubert, Navjot Singh, and Seckin Ungur, “ How to rebuild and reimagine jobs amid the coronavirus crisis, ” April 2020. This is because typically they have limited cash reserves, smaller client bases, and less capacity to manage commercial pressures than do larger companies. These businesses play an outsized role in economies and employ an estimated 80 percent of the continent’s workforce in both the formal and informal sectors, but during times of crisis they are often the least resilient. The reason for this classification is that this group of SMEs represent a significant portion of the total employment within the landscape beyond sole proprietors as highlighted in our recent survey where the majority of this group employed >100 and <500 employees. 1 The lower threshold is based on a rough extract of the latest thresholds published by National Small Business Act with the upper thresholds including some larger SMEs. We define SMEs as “a separate and distinct business entity, together with its branches or subsidiaries, if any, including cooperative enterprises, managed by one owner or more predominantly carried on in any sector or subsector.” Specifically, our focus is on businesses with a turnover of more than R15m and less than R500m. The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is causing untold human suffering across Africa and is likely to leave an indelible impact on the continent’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

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