I spent today in Cape Town where Global Entrepreneurship Week welcomed the International Finance Corporation and IBM’s SME Toolkit Global Partners from around the world.  The gathering enabled users of the Toolkit to share experiences and lessons learned to date, to train partners on the latest 2.5 software release, and to gather ideas for future program development.  It was also about partnerships – a theme that continues to emerge on this trip.

After addressing this gathering of leaders of entrepreneurial support organizations, I was followed by presentations from a host of others deeply engaged in this field.  It struck me just how much is already happening to support entrepreneurship, how carefully it is being measured and how valuable Global Entrepreneurship Week is, enabling those who are hard at work and often short of time to look up and think with others.  The work of the Global Banking Alliance and World Bank for example in financing women entrepreneurs is starting to deliver significant results now.  The Aspen Institute’s, ANDE (Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs), has assembled most of the leading intermediaries (firms providing capital and/or business development services), funders, and experts who share a common desire to create a movement to unleash the potential of Small and Growing Businesses (SGBs) in emerging markets.  And spokespeople from IBM laid out a new comprehensive program of support efforts they will soon unveil in markets around the world.  By putting the spotlight on what everyone is doing once a year during Global Entrepreneurship Week, we hope not just to coordinate those playing in the same sandbox, but to show were efforts are ineffective in an effort to help focus resources on what is working.

Our Cape Town gathering expanded further following the conference when Global Entrepreneurship Week, Wits Business School and ANDE co-hosted a Speednetwork the Globe event overlooking the sun setting behind Tabor Mountain.  A showing of the new Global Entrepreneurship Week video left the crowd energized. We were joined by dozens of leaders from the Cape Town entrepreneurship community along with aspiring entrepreneurs who, following an announcement of the launch of ANDE Africa, took quickly to the Speednetworking concept and stayed well past our scheduled close.

With this network in place, and organizations like Wits Business School, the IFC, IBM, Junior Achievement and Endeavor on the ground, South Africa is well on its way to achieving the goal set forth by the country’s new president, Jacob Zuma, to create half a million new jobs by year’s end and 4 million new jobs by 2014.  The task once again for policymakers is how to tap on this cultural capital by creating a business environment that supports new ventures and an education system that prepares the workforce to take the entrepreneurial path.

Tomorrow I will go to Johannesburg to explore with leaders just that question.

Jonathan Ortmans is the President of Global Entrepreneurship Week and is based in Washington D.C.