CHAPTER 6: PRESENTATION OF FINDINGS
6.2.8 Training Provided to Participants
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as they learnt from one another and, on occasion, offered support to one another. Jarvis (1987) states that people are the result of learning and that learning occurs when interacting with others and it continues to shape their behaviour. Women's participation in the fund was important for enhancing their learning and improving their businesses. In short, it improved their connections and other community programmes that would improve their lives.
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I am not thinking like I was before my agribusiness and the assistance from the fund because the little experience and knowledge I had from my grandparents has
increased. Positive thinking has changed my behaviour (Primary Data, 2020).
Ngabisa benefited from the training facilitated by the fund through SEDCO and she shared her experience and she said, “SEDCO provided us with the training; this training was conducted in a classroom setting as we took notes of what was being taught” (Primary Data, 2020).
Zandie also attended the training and said:
The fund provided one-day training every time I borrowed the money from the organization. The training was mainly on business management and record keeping.
There were about 20 participants during the training where people from SEDCO conducted and facilitated the trainings (Primary Data, 2020).
For my research participants, the training formed part of their experience and they learnt a lot, especially about business management and bookkeeping. Alice, who sold vegetables, said the training was half a day and there were facilitators from SEDCO who facilitated on how to keep records for her businesses.
According to Doreen:
We received training and they taught us how money should be handled, how to account for stock bought and how to separate income generated by the business and profits made…The training from the fund on business management skills noted that we should separate the business money and personal money. They told us not to use our salary from the business to do our personal things. However, that is not the case [in practice], when you see money, you fulfil your needs (Primary Data, 2020).
Similarly, Nonhlanhla is one of the participants who related how she received training from the fund through SEDCO and the training lasted for an hour. She said the facilitation was about everything that she needed to know about her business, especially record-keeping and how to improve her sales. Another respondent, Sonto said she was out of the country when the training was conducted the first time she borrowed money. However, she received help from a woman who attended the training, stating what they were taught such as how to keep records of their businesses and business management skills. It lasted for one day. The OECD
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(2012) reports that if vulnerable groups are well trained or given the necessary skills, they could attain better socio-economic status and be able to improve the employment prospects, and from the outcome they could contribute to their country’s economic growth.
The majority of the participants received additional training from other agricultural institutions or stakeholders in Eswatini.
Thoko said:
Most of the workshops I was attending were a week or two weeks training, whereby we were booked in hotels. Most of training was doing theory where we were later told to do drill and practice what we have learnt. You know how difficult it is to remember some of the things because I am old but what I would do is I would practice what I have learnt. If I have forgotten I would refer to the notes (Primary Data, 2020).
Some participants also felt that the training was not enough to make an impact to inform their choices. Though she learnt a little from the training, Doreen still questioned whether she ever learnt anything from the training, as she was not taught that tenders take a long payment period and it was not wise to use the income from the fund to service the tender from Inyatsi
Construction. She said:
Well, I would say that the training helped me to a certain extent. It didn’t help me that much because if it really helped me maybe I was going to be able to see that. I really don’t know how I can explain this. The training did help but I am seeing that the training received from the fund didn’t help me because of the way my business was performing poorly. Because once I tried and accepted the tender things went sideways and I didn’t know what to do. Because if they elaborated more on business
management, I would have seen that accepting the tender would negatively affect my business (Primary Data, 2020).
According to Lindiwe the training provided was not fruitful enough as SEDCO did not specialise in piggery projects so the training was a generalised lesson on businesses (Primary Data, 2020).
Lindiwe, who completed Form 4, said:
I have observed that for people who were not able to complete the high school level of education it is very difficult to master something, new knowledge over a short period
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of time such as conducting a one-day training and assume that we would be able to implement [it]. The facilitators were not able take us step by step, and even then, the time is just too short (Primary Data, 2020).
Lindiwe believed that due to their lack of education, the women were unable to understand business jargon or complex economic concepts. As a result, their ability to apply such learning was undermined, and empowerment suffered in the long run. Similarly, Ngabisa discussed her inability to finish school due to Eswatini culture and household male preference. This meant that when financial resources were scarce in a household, boys attended school but not the girls.
She said:
I was born from an unfortunate family. My mother wasn’t married. I had 9 siblings and I was the only girl. My mother was unable to pay for my school fees and
education but she was able to pay and make sure my other siblings got an education.
She encouraged me to go look for a job as a helper when I was growing up and I would say that life wasn’t in my favour. I grew up and I would get odd jobs here and there (Primary Data, 2020).
Margaret said:
The fund - before they give us the money [they] should continue to train us and recruit other organisations as well - to train us on how to run a business and emphasise the importance on bookkeeping because like I told you earlier I don’t keep books of accounts for my business. The fund did teach me and showed me how to keep these records and everything but I was not able to do them for my business. I think this was due to the fact that we are not used to it and the one-day training is not enough for us to master the concepts and that our culture doesn’t support the recording keeping in businesses like farming (Primary Data, 2020).
For Margaret, in spite of the training being too brief, she was made aware that this was now a business and that she had to take it seriously by doing accounts management in order to maintain it as a business and pay back the loan. This could also be due to the nature of her business, which was conducted at home. It allowed her to be flexible and she did not view maize farming as a business even though it provided an income.
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The stories of the participants show that there are various perspectives on the efficacy of the training they received. The findings reveal that while the training was very useful and
impactful for some participants, this was not the case for others. Some participants raised the issue of length of training, their own educational level, and topics provided by the
programme, which tended to be general rather than addressing the specific needs of individual women's businesses.
The findings from the participants imply that the SEDCO training was too short, regardless of its quality. The literature reveals that training increases entrepreneurs' exposure to
microcredit, credit amount, size, and strength of social capital (Ahmed et al., 2013).
Consequently, education and microfinance, when combined with financial services, have the potential to empower beneficiaries by assisting them in developing their business skills and entrepreneurship understanding that they need to carry out their daily life activities (Hadi et al., 2015). One could argue that education teaches people what is important in their daily lives.
In this section I show how the research participants learn from their experiences of participating in the Inhlanyelo fund. This section shows how women learn from their experiences through reflection, interaction and transformation and how they change as modelled by Jarvis. The connections between the lived experiences of people playing diverse roles such as church member, family member, and entrepreneur might influence their
learning. While learning, it is possible empowerment takes place through strategic choices that they make to transform their lives. Training can enhance their experiential learning but it is impacted by individual’s biographies, and how well the training matches their learning levels, as well as the quality of the training itself.