Empowering start-ups through saving
THE issue of unemployment in South Africa is no secret, but the resolution to the problem seems to lie outside of the capabilities of the government.
New enterprise development codes, business incubators and accelerators are often not equipped with the contextual knowledge to create microeconomies at the bottom of the pyramid.
This provides a unique market for a social enterprise like The Clothing Bank to equip women entrepreneurs to create their own businesses.
The Clothing Bank was founded on the proposition that dealt with the excessive waste in the clothing retail sector which was incurred when one season’s fashions left the shelves and was replaced by the next.
The old stock was donated by retail chains to the Bank and sold to the ladies on the programme at a significantly reduced rate who used the stock to sell in their communities. The partner stores, like Woolworths and Edcon group, can actively see the difference they are making because The Clothing Bank not only supports the entrepreneurs, but also equips them with business management skills.
Happiness Makhatini and Busisiwe Mjova’s journey in entrepreneurship is living testament to the remark made by Shark Tank panelist Vinny Lingam, “female entrepreneurs are really good; they are driven, they’re hard-working”.
The problem the entrepreneurs faced was not an uncommon one to any aspiring start-up – that of cash flow.
When the holiday period was over at the beginning of each new year, the ladies struggled to buy their stock for January and this limited their growth.
The founders of The Clothing Bank, Tracey Gilmore and Tracey Chambers, put in place measures to help alleviate this by making use of the crowd-saving platform, ADDaBIT. The platform allows for saving of R300 per month into a fund with no admin fees where the ladies on the programme can put aside funds to purchase new stock after the expensive month of December.
“We intend to start doing the same for the winter months too,” says Tracey Gilmore, “that and the Christmas period put additional strain on our entrepreneurs and creating the fund is teaching them to prepare for that”.
The philosophy of this initiative is aligned with the values that ADDaBIT was built on, as CEO Michael Griffin explains, “in a society where the economic restraints make saving low on the priority list ... This is what ADDaBIT aims to facilitate and we are proud to be supporting The Clothing Bank in the work they are doing.”