The Power Partnership Supporting South Africa’s Smallest Businesses
There is a distinct kind of stress that any South African running a small business knows all too well: the moment the lights flicker, die, and leave you to watch your stock spoil, your card machines shut down, and your entire day’s revenue vanish into the dark. For thousands of entrepreneurs, this isn’t a rare mishap. It is a routine hurdle that shows up uninvited on the busiest days, wiping out hours of preparation and forcing business owners to recalculate their margins around a problem they never created and cannot control.
For South Africa’s micro-enterprises, the arithmetic of blackouts is brutal. A spaza shop loses its refrigeration; a hair salon loses its blow dryers mid-appointment; a home-based seamstress sits idle for hours at a stretch. This is a tax paid disproportionately by those who can least afford it, falling hardest on the informal sector that keeps so many communities functioning.
This is a story about changing that reality, not with a grand, detached corporate gesture, but by literally handing power from one set of hands to another.
AutoX, the Port Elizabeth (Gqeberha) manufacturer behind iconic battery brands Willard and SABAT, has teamed up with funding partner Inyosi Empowerment to deliver backup power to the small business owners who need it most. Last year, the partners sent 80 Uninterrupted Power Supply (UPS) units directly to vulnerable small businesses. This year, the initiative features a strategic twist.
Rather than distributing the units from a distance, AutoX is routing them as grants through three trusted, community-embedded organizations: The Small Enterprise Foundation (SEF), which helps women in impoverished areas build paths out of poverty; TCB’s Grow ECD Programme, which supports early childhood development centres operating on razor-thin margins; and Ranyaka, a non-profit managing vital community hubs in under-resourced areas.
By structuring this as a grant, AutoX and Inyosi are embedding accountability into the project. These three partners are tasked with ensuring the units reach the exact classrooms and micro-enterprises where they will have the greatest impact. It is a deliberate handover of judgment to the people closest to the need.
The intentionality extends to how the equipment travels. Every step of the journey runs through Inyosi’s iHive procurement platform, utilising local, black-owned businesses to handle the logistics. Building on last year’s success with GoGirl Couriers, a 100% black female-owned logistics company, the initiative ensures that the supply chain itself stimulates the local economy. It is a system of neighbours helping neighbours, turning a logistics puzzle into an active micro-economy where every delivery route becomes an act of enterprise development.
The lithium-ion battery units being distributed deliver 2.2kW of clean backup power, enough to keep essential electronics humming without the noise, toxic fumes, or crushing fuel costs of a diesel generator. Across the communities, that quiet hum translates into immediate, tangible relief: a nursery school keeping its heaters running for toddlers on a freezing morning; a community centre remaining open for evening adult literacy classes; a mother able to run her home business long after the kids have gone to sleep. In every scenario, it represents the difference between a productive day and a complete standstill.
It is easy to look at Enterprise Development through the clinical lens of scorecards and B-BBEE compliance. It is much harder, and infinitely more rewarding, to look at it through the eyes of that mother finishing her evening’s work, or a toddler in a warm, brightly lit classroom.
“At AutoX, we believe that true empowerment goes beyond financial investment,” says Procurement Manager Tertius de Ridder.
By deliberately bypassing generic corporate charity in favour of deep, community-led collaboration, AutoX and Inyosi are helping rewrite the narrative for SA’s micro-enterprises. They aren’t just waiting for the grid to fix itself; they are fuelling the unstoppable spirit of South African business, one quiet hum at a time.
