Monwabisi Park Spaza Association Meeting

We invited shop owners by distributing invitation flyers, and this time we also put a map with directions on the back of the flyer to ensure that no one would get lost. We invited thirteen shop owners to this meeting, all people who had attended the TTO information session two weeks ago. We chose those shop owners because we had heard from Stanley that at the information session they had discussed the need to work together, and so we believed they would be the most open to the ideas we wanted to discuss at the meeting.

Guest speaker speaking to Monwabisi Park shop owners

We had the opportunity to benefit from the presence of two guest speakers in the form of shop owners living in Harare. We had met these shop owners through contacts at the TTO, and we knew that they were part of a spaza shop association in Harare. We thought it would be beneficial to have them speak to the Monwabisi Park shop owners about their experiences, and so we invited them to attend the meeting. However, when they were invited they became very excited and even took it a step further, offering to function as co-facilitators and translators during the meeting, an offer which our team was thrilled to accept.

For this presentation the team was able to get in contact with a group of shop owners who recently started their own association of spaza shops.  This association formed in another, formal section of Khayletisha called Harrare.  The association started in September of 2010, and is called the Imvuseleo Business Network (IBN).  There are currently thirteen members, and who already begun to see the benefits of cooperation.  In order to stimulate the Monwabisi Park spaza owner’s interest, we asked the leaders of the IBN to explain why they started the association and some of benefits to working together.

Members of the IBN at their capacity building graduation

Working with the Harare shop owners we devised a meeting plan with four main sections. We planned for this meeting to last about two hours because we felt there were many topics to discuss. Our team opened the meeting by giving a ten to fifteen minute presentation on all of the work that we had been doing on Monwabisi Park over the past seven weeks. We discussed some brief background on who we were, then all of the major methodological steps we had taken, and finally we described some of the key findings and results that we had derived from our project so far. The purpose of this presentation was to give all the shop owners present a complete and accurate context for our presence, and the Harare shop owners assisted us in translating the presentation for anyone present who spoke only Xhosa.

After our presentation, we held a general discussion on the benefits of cooperating with each other, and hear how the Monwabisi Park shop owners felt about working with each other. Then the shop owners from Harare spoke about their experiences, and finally we would all discussed the possible formation of a Monwabisi Park spaza association. The meeting occurred as planned on December 9th with eight Monwabisi Park shop owners in attendance, and the outcomes of the meeting are described in our results section.