Triple Trust Organisation

TTO Logo

The Triple Trust Organisation was first created in 1988. Originally, the focus of the organisation was to provide business skills training and support to poor and disadvantaged people in South Africa. The organisation was created in the Western Cape province, but has since expanded and now orchestrates projects throughout South Africa. The TTO has provided business training to over 30,000 people since its inception. Their original mission had a three-part approach, which was how the name Triple Trust Organisation was derived. Those three parts were to offer skills and business training to impoverished people, to supply them with access to markets, and to provide them with access to finance (http://www.tto.org.za/).

The year 2001 marked an important turning point in the history of the TTO, because they shifted the focus of their organisation away from assisting individuals and towards becoming a market facilitator. Rather than focus on helping individual people, the TTO believed they could have a greater impact by helping to strengthen and develop existing markets that catered to the poor (http://www.tto.org.za/).

Central to this transition is the concept of making markets work for the poor (MMW4P). The key aspect of this theory is that the starting point for economic improvement should be the market, not the people themselves or their individual businesses. In order to strengthen these markets, MMW4P advocates value-chain analysis, which is the process of investigating the entire supply chain from start to finish. The goal of the investigation is to identify obstacles that are preventing or impeding the poor from participating in the given supply chain, and then devise strategies to remove those obstacles. This idea of MMW4P is key to understanding the TTO’s methods (Southern Hemisphere Consultants, 2007).