Financing small and medium enterprises in the Republic of South Africa

This paper presents findings from two surveys relating to access to finance for small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in South Africa. The first is a survey of commercial banks and other financial institutions involved in lending to SMEs (the supply side survey), with survey respondents accounting for some 89% of assets in the banking sector in 2009. The second is a survey of SMEs, in which a number of firms originally surveyed in late 2007 as part of the World Bank's South Africa Enterprise Survey of 2008 were revisited in order to assess how the global economic crisis of 2007 to 2009 had affected their business and their access to financial services (the demand side survey). In total, 1,057 firms were surveyed as part of the original survey (in 2007), and 234 firms were resurveyed as part of this update (in 2010).