Unemployed youth and rural women in the lesser-known village of eMkhandlwini in Bhukhanana under the Mthonjaneni local municipality in KwaZulu-Natal are taking matters into their own hands.
Ravaged by poverty, hopelessness and joblessness where young women often give in to the pressures of marrying older men to escape the wrath of daily hardships, their drive to be self-reliant is dismantling this practice.
Twenty-four-year old Phindile Msane who holds a qualification in agriculture from Mangosuthu University of Technology recalls that she knew immediately after matric that she wanted to be a farmer.
“Perhaps I would say that agriculture holds a sentimental value to me. We lost our father at a very young age and we survived through selling chickens. My mother later passed on too, so I had to take over the business to raise my younger sister,” she explains.
Msane said when she completed her qualification, she joined a long list of other unemployed youth loitering in the village.
“When I went to university, my business wasn’t doing well because I couldn’t juggle studying and also run the chicken business. That was when I was approached by local women wanting us to form a cooperative. We then decided to focus on goat and chicken farming.”
A member of the cooperative, 49-year-old Balungile Mkhwanazi said they leveraged on a start-up donated by the King Cetshwayo district municipality.
“We requested assistance from the municipality and they gave us goats and about 20 parent stock chickens. These chickens are breeding chicks, which we sell to locals. Goats are proving to be a money spinner because they sell very fast,” said Mkhwanazi.
She added that although the cooperative is still small, it makes all the difference in creating jobs and turning the negative face of the rural village.
“We are recruiting mostly young girls who have completed matric because we don’t want them to fall into the trap of [teenage] pregnancy,” she said.
District mayor Thami Ntuli said the municipality has taken a stance to stimulate rural economies through cooperatives.
“We have a separate budget set aside for this work because cooperatives are the heart of rural economies and they drive job creation. In addition, cooperatives are assigned agricultural extension officers and a veterinary health expert to assist them,” said Ntuli.
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