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An Evaluation of The Jobs Fund’s Enterprise Development Funding Window, 2012 – 2024

Prof Haroon Bhorat provides an independent DPRU (UCT) evaluation of the Jobs Fund’s Enterprise Development (ED) window over 2012 to 2024, covering 88 projects and R13.4bn in combined grant and matched funding. It quantifies the window’s labour-market impact (some 253,000 full-time-equivalent opportunities, with employment outweighing training), examines the cost per job by sector and sphere, and introduces purpose-built indices to rank projects by success and by the constraints they faced, distilling lessons on what drives project performance.

Presented at the 2026 Public Economics Conference.