New initiative aims to ease spaza-shop headaches
WITS Business School and headache powder brand GrandPa yesterday announced a partnership aimed at helping spaza shop owners grow their businesses.
The Grand-Pa Spaza Shop Programme will be offered by the school’s Centre for Entrepreneurial Development and will provide owners of small shops with the tools to ensure the sustainable growth of their stores.
“This is the first time we have developed a course for a different stakeholder group, as our students are usually from corporates,” says director Chimene Chetty. Topics such as cash flow management, marketing, competitive buying and pricing, and daily business functions would be covered in the new course.
The programme is being piloted with 40 spaza shop owners from areas such as Soweto, Cosmo City, Pretoria North and Diepsloot. Wits Business School employees, who would usually not qualify for admission into courses offered at the business school, will be among the candidates.
Lecturers have been carefully selected to allow for discussions in African languages to take place during classes. Students will be required to attend once a week for five content sessions. The sixth and last session will be for each entrepreneur to build a business strategy.
Kgoshi Mandlazi, owner of PK Bathokwa, a spaza shop in Alexandra, has been running his store for over 20 years and Grand-Pa was one of the first products he sold.
“The only qualification I have to run my businesses is the blood in my veins and my understanding of the customers,” Mr Mandlazi said, adding that he joined the programme to grow his business.
Liezel Bygate, a spokeswoman for Grand-Pa manufacturer GlaxoSmithKline (GSK), which sponsors the course, said there are 90,000 to 110,000 informal trading facilities nationwide, ranging from hawker operations to small shops.
Spaza
shops
in SA
are estimated to turn over around R7bn worth of goods a year.
“Given the country’s unemployment rate, we realise that small business is a critical part of solving the problem, and GrandPa’s business,” said Ms Bygate.
Last month, Coca-Cola was hailed by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan for the launch of its Eko- centre container programme.
The 6m-long steel containers, which use solar power and a water purification system to provide power and water to communities, are to be used to support rural female entrepreneurs.
Mr Gordhan said he hoped the initiative would inspire other large enterprises to do the same.
The Gauteng Enterprise Propeller, which helped to set up the programme, will be providing mentorship to the entrepreneurs after they graduate from the programme at the end of next month. This is to keep the initiative as a sustainable growing relationship with the business owners.
Wits Business School executive-in-residence Thami Mazwai said the programme would help to grow the spaza shops by keeping the buying power of customers in the communities in which they live.
“The informal market in our country is the biggest and it is fighting for the buying power, which is the oxygen of businesses,” Mr Mazwai said.