Times Of Swaziland: SARFED UPSCALING  STREET VENDORS

SARFED UPSCALING  STREET VENDORS
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BY KWANELE DHLADHLA on 24/10/2017 08:20:00


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.