Siyakhula BoMake

Women paving a bright future for their kids-Siyakhula Bomake

Every parent wishes to pave a bright future for their kids: Siyakhula Bomake community of practice (CP) chooses to instill the right values in their children through creating a savings platform for the young ones. Siyakhula bomake is found under Ludzeludze Inkhundla from the Zombodze chiefdom. This CP has 27 members: 19 females and 8 males between the ages of 10 to 25 years. The main objective is for women from the Zombodze community to enroll their kids and institute some financial literacy through savings that will assist these young people take care of their personal needs.

Introduction to the listen project

The fist point of contact between Siyakhula Bomake and the LISTEN project was in February 2022. The listen team introduced the Human Centered Design (HCD) approach to problem solving. Through the HCD approach, Siyakhula entered the discovery stage where they were able to segment members according to age group, sex and occupation. Siyakhula progressed to the define stage where the CP was able to identified the common problems that the community was faced with. The two key problems identified were unemployment as well as poverty.  Siyakhula Bomake was able to then utilize the prioritization tool, which was able to pinpoint poverty as the priority challenge among the CP.  As part of the idea generation stage, the CP concluded that starting a business would be the leading problem solving technique that would assist them alleviates poverty in the community.

Impact of the LISTEN Program

Siyakhula BoMake was introduced to an enterprise facilitator in June 2022. Through the assistance of the enterprise facilitator, Siyakhula boMake resumed their floor polish producing business. Each member was able to contribute a sum of $1.40 towards seed capital for the business. Through vertical linking, Siyakhula bomake received skills training on the production of floor polish from Nazarene Compassionate Ministries.  The concept of trinity management (Market, product and finance) was also implemented whereby siyakhula delegated tasks to each other. The team currently has 5 producers, 6 marketers and 3 financial management personnel.  Siyakhula Bomake produced 40 packs of 1 kg floor polish. These were sold to community members using the door-to-door marketing strategy. Each member was tasked with targeting at least 2 community members to make sales. The business was able to break even after sales. They aim to increase sale price in order to increase sales after next production.