Spaza News

I came upon this very interesting website called Spaza News. It is a website specifically catered to spaza shop owners. They release a newsletter which is distributed to spaza shop owners in certain parts of South Africa. The newsletters are highly educational and useful to spaza owner to learn proper business practices. It offers advice and it is very informative. I definitely want to contact the people that run the newsletter to talk about potentially expanding their publication to Monwabisi Park. This would be a great goal to complete for my IQP.

Here is the link to the website:

http://spazanews.co.za/

Project Description

Here is the description to the project I will be working on in South Africa.

The goal of this project is to strengthen spaza shop business operations and consumer services by helping the Triple Trust Organization extend and adapt its Shop-Net program to Monwabisi Park. Spaza shops are a vital aspect of neighbourhood life, offering residents easy access to groceries and other essential consumer goods while providing community-located jobs and income to shop owners and workers. The small scale of operations, limited training of operators, and logistical barriers to obtaining and easily handling goods leaves many spaza shops operating at less than optimal efficiency. Shop-Net helps spaza shop operators save on the cost of operations by becoming members of a wholesale purchasing cooperative, and offers opportunities for strengthening entrepreneurial abilities through educational workshops and networking with other spaza operators. This project will document the nature of spaza shop activity in Monwabisi Park and explore with shop owners their needs and priorities for business development and how these might be met through Shop-Net. The project will also develop practical responses to one priority spaza need and make recommendations to TTO for further program development, including regarding the regional Shop-Net warehouse planned for September 2011. 


I was really interested in this project because of its impact to the community. Spaza shops are extremely essential to the survival of many families in Monwabisi and people depend on the spaza shops to provide their basic goods. The project also interested me because of the implementation of a wholesale distributor. I interned at BJ's Wholesale this past summer and I got a chance to learn about how a wholesale club works so I thought I could make a great contribution to this project.


After our first PQP meeting and a couple meetings with my team members, it looks like everyone is highly interested in making a difference and it reflects on the enthusiasm I see. The workload has started to pile up but I am really looking forward to tackling and researching the project this coming long weekend.