SARFED UPSCALING STREET VENDORS

MBABANE – Manzini River Stone Mall and Mbabane Plaza have taken keen interest in supporting the SARFED (Southern African Research Foundation for Economic Development) programme for scaling up street vendors in Swaziland.

SARFED Coordinator George Choongwa said this was being done through business and skills development so as to expose the vendors to social and financial inclusion opportunities in the country.

Support

He said they want them to learn and practice how to save money raised from their businesses and SARFED through the support of several sponsors gives them capital boosting grants. The support gained from both Manzini river stone mall and Mbabane plaza has been overwhelming based on the fact that these business centres had appreciated the need to support this initiative as they believed that through collaboration between micro and macro enterprise community, the economy would be more sustainable due to backward and forward linkages.

Creation

The initiative was further supported by the 2017 SARFED sector report which denotes that, street vendors in Swaziland play a vital role in several areas, most prominently in job creation and micro livelihood.
“Despite having a low capital base of between E 100 to E 300, most (67 per cent) of these micro entrepreneurs manage a family size range of between four to seven dependents,” said Choongwa. 
However, about 97 per cent were willing to grow despite having no access to funding. These enterprises had also shown high degree of resilience for having being in operation for more than seven years, but among many challenges about 84 per cent of them were still faced with higher level of business illiteracy and 81 per cent of them had no other source of income.

Borrow

It has also been established that through the sector report, that the street vendors in Swaziland could neither borrow money nor save, which puts them at a situation where they cannot create wealth for themselves.
It has also been mentioned that the study indicated positive trends of sustainability despite the fact that these micro entrepreneurs were excluded from the economic main stream. By characteristic, they were the majority of the entire business fraternity of the country and were easy to establish, operate with very little risk. However, there were at present very little mechanism both from government and private sector that would support their growth and scalability.

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