<p style="text-align: justify;">South Africa’s inaugural <span style="color: #333399;"><em><strong>Supplier and Enterprise Development Awards (SED Awards)</strong> </em></span>will give recognition to corporates for their contribution to broad-based black economic empowerment, which is based on their actual year on year contributions rather than getting voted for by a panel of judges.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The organisers of the Awards, TaranisCo Advisory CC, one of South Africa’s leading service providers and facilitators empowering suppliers to government, aims to make the Awards the yardstick for corporates to manage sustainable procurement and enterprise development programmes within their business.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Businesses in more than 20 different economic sectors, both listed and unlisted, will complete a questionnaire covering 10 areas of B-BBEE compliance from, which the actual winners will emerged based on the points allocated for each year on year achievement.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">The Awards are open to companies who are categorised as Qualifying Small Enterprises (QSEs) and Generic Enterprises by the Amended B-BBEE Codes of 2015.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Announcing the Awards, TaranisCo Advisory’s MD, Gerrit Davids said “We are pleased to launch the first edition of the SED Awards, which will give recognition to those corporates who have responded positively to government’s policy on changing the economic landscape, especially through their commendable interventions in the areas of procurement and enterprise development respectively”.</p>
<p style="text-align: justify;">Davids pointed out that “the Awards is taking a different approach to the normal awards voting processes where the winners are voted for by a panel of judges. A firm of auditors will use the actual data provided by the nominated businesses, to calculate an overall score to determine a winner in each category. With the result, a smaller business could beat its bigger counterpart to an award, based on having a higher percentage score than others”.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">All Short-Listed Nominees will receive Recognition Awards with the top performing business declared as the overall winner of the specific category.</p>
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<p style="text-align: justify;">The deadline for entries is 24 January 2017 and the short-list will be announced on 26 January 2017. The Awards ceremony will take place on Wednesday 22 February 2017 in Johannesburg.</p>