What does it actually cost an SMME simply to compete for a government contract? Compulsory physical briefings and hard-copy submissions can create economic, geographic and disability-related barriers before a bid is even evaluated.
South Africa repeatedly tells us that small, medium and micro enterprises are essential to economic growth, employment creation and transformation.
Government policy speaks about increasing SMME participation in markets. Public procurement is recognised as one of the mechanisms through which this can happen.
But there is a question we are not asking often enough:
What does it actually cost an SMME simply to compete for a government contract?
And, perhaps more importantly:
Are some of our procurement processes undermining the very SMME participation that our policies say we want to increase?
Key points
- Compulsory physical briefings can impose substantial upfront costs on SMMEs before they earn any revenue from a tender.
- Businesses located far from the briefing venue can face a geographic cost disadvantage unrelated to their ability to perform the contract.
- Disabled entrepreneurs may face additional travel and support costs, compounding the participation barrier.
- Virtual or hybrid compulsory briefings can preserve attendance controls while reducing unnecessary economic and accessibility barriers.
- South Africa should measure the real cost of procurement participation, not only the administrative cost of running the procurement.
When eligibility depends on being able to afford the journey
Many public-sector tenders still include conditions such as:
- compulsory physical briefing meetings;
- compulsory physical site visits;
- hard-copy-only tender submissions;
- multiple bound copies of tender documents;
- physical delivery to a tender box; and
- automatic disqualification for failure to comply with these requirements.
Sometimes physical attendance is clearly justified.
If a company is tendering to undertake complex construction work, inspect a building, install specialised infrastructure or perform work where understanding the physical environment is essential, a compulsory site visit may be entirely reasonable.
But that is not true of every procurement.
For consulting, research, digital services, training, policy development, communications, professional services, software, artificial intelligence and many other forms of work, one has to ask:
What procurement purpose is achieved by requiring a supplier to travel across the country to sit in a room to receive information that could be provided through a properly administered virtual or hybrid briefing?
This is not simply a matter of convenience.
It is an economic access issue.
The hidden cost of competing
Consider a small Cape Town business interested in a national tender where the compulsory briefing takes place in Pretoria.
Before that business has earned a single rand from the opportunity, it may need to pay for:
- return airfare or other long-distance transport;
- airport transfers;
- local transport;
- accommodation, depending on the meeting time;
- meals;
- time away from productive work; and
- the administrative costs associated with preparing the bid.
The business located twenty minutes from the briefing venue faces nothing comparable.
Both companies may be equally capable of performing the contract.
But their cost of gaining permission to compete is radically different.
That creates a geographic advantage that has nothing to do with capability, quality, transformation, innovation or value for money.
For a micro-enterprise or young SMME operating with limited cash flow, several thousand rand in speculative travel costs can be enough to make participation impossible.
Government may technically have opened the tender to every qualifying business in South Africa.
Economically, however, access may be very different.
Disability can multiply that cost
For disabled entrepreneurs, the financial barrier can be considerably greater.
I am a disabled entrepreneur.
Depending on the journey and accessibility requirements involved, traveling to an inter-provincial compulsory briefing may mean that I cannot simply purchase one airline ticket and travel independently. I may need to travel with another person.
The participation cost may therefore include two airfares, additional transport requirements and, where necessary, accommodation for two people.
The same compulsory briefing that already creates a substantial financial barrier for an SMME can impose an even greater cost on a disabled entrepreneur.
This is an important distinction.
The additional expenditure does not arise because my company is less capable of delivering the contract.
It arises because of the way the procurement process has been designed.
That is where an SMME issue becomes an accessibility and equality issue as well.
A recent experience brought this into focus
A recent National Lotteries Commission procurement opportunity crystallised this issue for me.
There was a separate governance consideration relating to my previous employment and restraint-of-trade arrangements. That issue potentially had an established governance route through which the relevant decision-makers could consider whether participation should be permitted.
But there was another barrier entirely: the compulsory physical briefing.
Irrespective of what might ultimately have happened with the governance question, the physical-attendance requirement created its own threshold for participation.
That experience caused me to look beyond one procurement opportunity and ask a much bigger question:
How many potentially capable South African businesses never submit bids because they cannot afford the cost of becoming eligible to bid?
We currently do not appear to measure that loss.
The Constitution sets a higher standard than administrative habit
Section 217 of the Constitution requires organs of state, when contracting for goods or services, to operate procurement systems that are:
fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective.
It also permits procurement policies designed to protect or advance people disadvantaged by unfair discrimination.
This does not mean that compulsory physical meetings are automatically unconstitutional.
Nor does it mean that every physical submission requirement is unlawful.
The relevant question should be more disciplined:
Is the restriction necessary for the particular procurement, and is there a less exclusionary way of achieving the same legitimate procurement objective?
If physical inspection is essential, require it.
If the purpose is to ensure that every bidder hears the same briefing, has an opportunity to ask questions and is formally registered as having attended, technology already provides ways of achieving that without requiring every bidder to travel.
We know virtual compulsory briefings are possible — because government already uses them
This is not a hypothetical proposal.
National Treasury itself has conducted compulsory tender briefings virtually.
For example, National Treasury tender NT007-2026 specified a compulsory virtual briefing session via Microsoft Teams in June 2026. Treasury's tender listings also show numerous other briefing sessions being conducted through Microsoft Teams.
Treasury's transversal tender system also uses online tender submission for current procurements, while briefing sessions for numerous national contracts take place through Microsoft Teams.
This is important.
It demonstrates that procurement integrity does not inherently require everybody to be in the same physical room.
Attendance can be recorded.
Information can be standardised.
Questions and answers can be documented.
Deadlines remain deadlines.
Procurement controls remain procurement controls.
The method of participation changes; the substantive requirement does not.
There is a policy contradiction we need to examine
The Department of Small Business Development's 2026/27 Annual Performance Plan says that government intends to expand MSME access to markets and specifically identifies procurement platforms and partnerships with government entities as mechanisms for increasing domestic market opportunities.
The Department has set targets for supporting MSMEs to access those opportunities and links this work to inclusive growth and economic transformation.
That objective deserves support.
But we also need to examine whether procurement administration is aligned with it.
If the policy objective is to broaden SMME participation while the procurement process imposes substantial upfront costs simply to remain eligible to compete, there is a disconnect between policy intention and implementation.
That disconnect should be measured rather than assumed away.
Government already has a framework for asking these questions
South Africa's Socio-Economic Impact Assessment System — SEIAS exists partly because government recognised the danger of adopting rules without sufficiently understanding their full costs and economic consequences.
The Presidency explains that SEIAS was developed following concerns about failures to understand the full costs of regulation and its economic impact.
Among its objectives are promoting inclusive growth, addressing inequality and spatial imbalances, minimising implementation costs and reducing unnecessary regulatory burdens.
More importantly, the SEIAS methodology recognises that rules affect different groups differently.
It specifically requires attention to implementation and compliance costs, unintended consequences, economic inclusion and the distribution of costs and benefits across different groups.
That principle should also inform how we think about procurement design.
The cost of a compulsory physical briefing is not only the cost to the department holding the meeting.
It includes the cost transferred to every business required to attend.
Cost the participation requirement, not just the procurement
Before making a physical briefing compulsory, a procuring institution should therefore be asking questions such as:
How much will compliance with this requirement cost prospective suppliers?
Will suppliers from other provinces face materially higher participation costs?
Will small businesses be disproportionately affected?
Will disabled entrepreneurs incur additional disability-related participation costs?
Is physical presence genuinely necessary for this contract?
Could a verified virtual or hybrid process accomplish the same purpose?
Could an unnecessary physical requirement reduce competition by preventing otherwise capable businesses from bidding?
These are procurement-design questions.
They are also economic-development questions.
Accessibility is not an exception to good procurement design
There is sometimes a tendency to treat accessibility as something that happens after a standard process has been created.
A person encounters the barrier.
They disclose that they are disabled.
They request an accommodation.
An official then decides whether an exception can be made.
Universal Design asks a different question:
Why create the unnecessary barrier in the first place?
A hybrid compulsory briefing does not only benefit disabled entrepreneurs.
It benefits:
- small businesses with limited working capital;
- businesses outside major economic centres;
- rural enterprises;
- entrepreneurs with caregiving responsibilities;
- businesses that cannot lose an entire working day to travel;
- disabled entrepreneurs;
- and government itself through potentially broader competition.
That is the difference between individual accommodation and inclusive system design.
Hard-copy tender submissions deserve the same scrutiny
The same principle applies to tender requirements involving printed originals, duplicate bound copies, USB drives, sealed envelopes, couriers and physical tender boxes.
There may be circumstances where a physical component remains genuinely necessary.
But necessity should be demonstrated rather than inherited from administrative tradition.
National Treasury already has procurements where bidders submit electronically through the e-Tender publication portal.
The question is therefore not whether secure electronic procurement is conceptually possible.
It already exists.
The policy question is why unnecessary physical processes continue elsewhere, particularly where they impose avoidable participation costs.
A practical principle for inclusive procurement
South Africa does not need to abolish compulsory briefings.
It needs to distinguish between compulsory participation and compulsory physical presence.
Those are not the same thing.
A more inclusive principle would be:
Where physical presence is not objectively necessary to understand or perform the contract, compulsory tender briefings should provide an equivalent verified virtual or hybrid participation option.
And:
Electronic tender submission should be the default wherever the procurement can be securely and lawfully administered electronically, with physical-only requirements used where there is an identifiable procurement reason for them.
This preserves procurement discipline while reducing unnecessary barriers.
We need evidence
I do not believe this conversation should end with one blog article.
We need to establish the scale of the problem.
BeAccessible intends to examine a sample of South African public procurement opportunities and ask:
- How many require compulsory physical briefings?
- How many offer virtual or hybrid alternatives?
- How many require hard-copy delivery?
- Which provinces host the physical meetings?
- How much would businesses in other provinces reasonably spend to participate?
- How frequently is physical presence actually inherent to the contract?
- Are reasonable-accommodation mechanisms clearly provided?
- What additional costs may be imposed on disabled entrepreneurs?
- How do these requirements affect the government's own SMME-development objectives?
The objective should not be to weaken procurement controls.
It should be to improve procurement design.
The question government should be asking
If South Africa wants SMMEs to participate meaningfully in public procurement, eligibility on paper is not enough.
We need to examine the real cost of access to the opportunity.
A business should not lose the opportunity to compete merely because an administrative process unnecessarily requires it to purchase an airline ticket.
And a disabled entrepreneur should not have to spend twice as much simply to enter the same competition when an accessible, secure and administratively equivalent alternative is readily available.
South Africa's Constitution calls for procurement that is fair, equitable, transparent, competitive and cost-effective.
Our procurement processes should be designed to advance those principles — not inadvertently price capable businesses out before evaluation has even begun.
Accessibility is not charity. It is business intelligence.
And in public procurement, accessibility may also be good economic policy.
Share your experience
If you are a South African SMME, entrepreneur or disability-owned enterprise that has encountered compulsory physical briefings, hard-copy-only submissions or other procurement requirements that created avoidable participation costs, BeAccessible would like to hear from you.
Your experience can help build the evidence base needed to understand how procurement design affects real access to public opportunities.
Contact hello@beaccessible.co.za with the subject line Public Procurement Access.
BeAccessible
Accessibility Intelligence for organisations, systems and economies.
Note: This article raises public-policy and procurement-design questions and does not constitute legal advice.