BY TSABEDZE KWANELE
MBABANE – Umhluma Women and Youth Foundation members are reaping the fruits of dedicating months in their financial literacy and business development training program. They started the trainining program last year to ensure that their members, who are mostly widows, are not left behind in economic development and the opportunities therein.
Founder of the foundation Lungelo Zulu confirmed that as of last week, the Foundation has been disbursing the seed capital for members to develop their businesses. He revealed that, “For now, we’re grouping them into groups of 4, where we have twelve members in total. We have disbursed seed capital to the groups at Buhleni, Ntabamhloshana and Ngculwini. Our aim is that they are able to afford their needs and good standard of living.”
Dumsile Nsoko, Chairperson of the Ntabamhloshane based Sitanani Widows’ Association, which is one of the groups which has received seed capital from Umhluma, had this to say about their plans; “Our dream is that we run our own project. We’ll initially grow mushrooms – we’ll start by finding markets for them, and then grow them. We also had the vision to find a piece of land where we can build sheds for indigenous and non-indigenous chickens”
Umhluma Women and Youth Foundation is aiming to help more women’s enterprise groups to access the Regional Development Funds through gradual growth of their enterprises.
