Shared Interest News

During my last trip to South Africa, I visited Mashishing, a township near Lydenberg in Mpumalanga where Beehive Financial Services runs a micro-enterprise program benefitting from a Shared Interest guarantee. The experience was both hopeful and sobering. Hopeful because I again saw how resourceful people can be in difficult circumstances, and how modest help from strong development finance organizations can make a real difference. Sobering because there are still so many who are trapped in poverty in the second decade of a free South Africa.

Sonto Mkhonza, one of the group I met in Mashishing, expressed her frustration, citing a long period of searching unsuccessfully for work.”You’ve got a brain. You’ve got hands. You’ve got to do something!” she told me she said to herself. What she did was to join a saving and borrowing group of five women, under the supervision of Beehive Financial Services (BFS). Three months ago she borrowed R2,000 to boost her second-hand clothing business, which she operates by purchasing used clothes in Durban and Johannesburg, for her neighbors in Mashishing. (Mashishing’s answer to “personal shoppers” in a township with no clothing stores.) She has successfully repaid her first loan, and is now preparing to apply for a second. continued…