The rural economy can be resuscitated and sustained if local shopkeepers come together and adopt a culture of bulk buying.
This makes prices competitive and fosters a culture of ad-hoc specials.
Collective buying power is how small businesses survive.
The money to make this work is already circulating in our communities.
In the Eastern Cape alone, R1.9bn is allocated to the school nutrition programme. Township and rural suppliers can tap into this budget by supplying groceries to schools.
Another R18bn of the national social grant budget is spent in the Eastern Cape. That money is effectively on the doorstep of rural shops.
What’s needed are innovative ways to attract social grant recipients to spend locally.
This means designing product packages that meet real needs, including monthly burial society contributions, school supplies, and staple food bundles.
Understanding the customer is the first step to winning them back.
R20bn from social grants and the school nutrition programme circulates in the Eastern Cape every year.
If even a fraction of that is redirected to small local shops, it can sustain those businesses, reduce unemployment and slow urban migration.
To see the spread of big malls into rural towns as “development” is wrong.
We cannot celebrate a consumption-driven economy while failing to build productive, locally-owned enterprises.
Young South Africans should look to business skills as a way out of poverty, instead of queuing for jobs in an economy that can’t even absorb graduates anymore.
Rural economic recovery cannot happen without agriculture and agro-processing.
We need industries that respond to rural culture and resources.
Take the Eastern Cape’s booming funeral industry.
Every weekend, thousands of animals are killed for funerals, rituals, weddings, imigidi and other celebrations.
Yet the hides go to waste. Out of ignorance, they are thrown away or burned.
In formal abattoirs, trucks collect hides daily for factories that turn them into leather goods.
This is a major untapped economic opportunity.
Instead of resenting foreign nationals who have built competitive spaza networks, we should use the tools and policies already at our disposal.
Government support exists. A R500m Spaza Shop Support Fund provides eligible SA-owned spaza shops with up to R300,000 through a mix of grants and low-interest loans.
South Africans can push back against poverty with these grants and the billions already circulating in their communities.
The opportunity is visible. The question is whether we will organise ourselves to seize it. — Sizwe Kupelo, via email