The Impact of Income-Generating Projects on Stimulating the Development of Entrepreneurial Activities in Communities : The Holding Hands Case

The poverty levels of rural households in South Africa remain an unresolved issue. The South African government introduced interventions and policies to combat the issue of poverty and inequality through the initiation and development of income-generating community projects. The scope of this study focuses on exploring the use of income-generating community projects to facilitate sustainable community development. These projects do have a positive impact on communities, but fail to develop into sustainable businesses. Participants of these income-generating community projects are mostly women. Even though these interventions battle to develop into sustainable businesses, they have a positive impact on sustainable economic development through the stimulation of other entrepreneurial activities in communities that increase financial, human and social capital in these communities. The methodology of the study consisted of a qualitative single case embedded design that was used to construct constructivist grounded theory. The Holding Hands income-generating community project in the North West Province, South Africa, was used to develop the case study. The case study was constructed in ATLAS.ti on a timeline using a document analysis to develop the themes and codes. The gaps in the data were filled by conducting interviews with the participants of the project. To ensure the sustainable development of income-generating community projects over time is a challenging exercise because there are various factors of crucial importance that have an impact on the development of these projects that cannot always be controlled. It is, therefore, of the utmost importance to identify the impact of interventions on communities to be able to identify the key elements that should be focused on to ensure sustainable community development. The findings of this study identified for the case of the Holding Hands income-generating community project, the initiation of an income-generating community project stimulated the development of other entrepreneurial activities in the community. The benefits of this project impacted the community in various ways and contributed to sustainable community development. These findings contribute to strengthening the sustainable development of income-generating community projects and to maximize the impact of sustainable community development. Therefore entrepreneurial skills should be a core development focus in the skills development programmes included in the development plans of income-generating interventions. These interventions should be designed to identify entrepreneurs, develop their skills, provide funding to them as well as the support and mentoring required to develop an environment where entrepreneurship could flourish. Replicating these interventions in a responsible, well-designed manner in various communities will have a positive impact on the levels of poverty and job-insecurity currently experienced in South Africa.