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Four years ago, five women with two sewing machines started talking. There were not enough jobs in their community and they knew they had to find a way to make some money.
Like many South African communities, Braamfischerville––the community where they live––is plagued with high unemployment. But these five women decided to create work for themselves in order to take care of their families.
That dream for a better life became The Soweto Sewing Company.
No stranger to leadership, Judith has been providing for her family since she was 16. As the sole breadwinner, Judith had to make the tough decision to forgo her high school education so the needs of her five siblings could be met.
She started working as a table hand (assistant) at a local sewing factory. She soon worked her way up to seamstress, and then to factory manager. At The Soweto Sewing Company, Judith now oversees six workers making a product line of household and industrial fabric items.
A wife and mother of seven, Judith had advanced sewing skills but lacked the knowledge to effectively manage her business. So, when she heard about the Paradigm Shift program being offered at a local church, she jumped at the opportunity to increase her business skills.
For 18 weeks, Judith faithfully attended the Paradigm Shift 
business training and discipleship program where she learned how to price her products to gain maximum profit. She also learned the principles of marketing her business to increase customers.
Applying these principles, Judith made business cards and flyers for The Soweto Sewing Company. Then, armed with her new marketing materials, she frequented business trade expos to expand her clientele.
Her new strategy paid off. At a business expo, Judith met a representative from the Coca-Cola Company.
Soon after, the Coca-Cola Company ordered half a million aprons!
Her business grew exponentially as a result and the increased work enabled Judith to employ more workers. While all this is certainly reason to rejoice, Judith makes it clear that she is most grateful for her spiritual transformation.
“I’m learning every day to be more Christ-like. There is a change in me. I used to be angry all the time, but now I’ve become gentle.” – Judith
Judith, far right, with her team at the Soweto Sewing Company
It was like clockwork. Every month, a church volunteer team would visit a nearby impoverished community and drop off the donated clothes they had faithfully collected over the previous weeks. With bright smiles and happy hearts, this ministry continued with great vigor as the months ticked by.
Many volunteers participated in the excitement of engaging with the community. But some of the clothing recipients soon grew wise to how the priority of distribution worked: neediest to least neediest. The solution…to look the neediest.
How? By burning their own clothes so they would look more needy and get new clothes!
When it became clear what was happening, the volunteers felt hurt and betrayed that their generosity was being abused in this way.
When engaging with the poor, we first need to ask, how do we help without hurting? How do we foster the God-given gift of work instead of reducing people and their abilities to dependence on our leftovers?
In the Garden of Eden, God told Adam to work the land and produce a harvest. Every capable man and woman should be engaged in some kind of work. No one is meant to sit idly, depending only on the latest drop of stuff from a charity or church.
There is something about good, honest, consistent labor that produces self-esteem, dignity and respect in an individual. Work is not a curse, it’s a blessing!
As believers, the way we understand poverty plays a major role in determining the solutions we attempt to use to alleviate it. Often, we think of poverty as a lack of material things––money, food, clothing, housing, etc. However, a World Bank study of over 60,000 people from 60 low-income countries was very revealing.
When working with the material poor, it is crucial to determine whether relief or development is the appropriate intervention.
“Relief” is the urgent provision of emergency aid to reduce immediate suffering from a natural or man-made crisis. It is characterized by a provider-receiver dynamic in which the provider gives assistance, often material, to the receiver, who is largely incapable of helping himself.
“Development” is a process of on-going change that is not done to people or for people but with people. It is an empowering process in which both the helpers and the helped become more of what God created them to be.
Applying the wrong intervention is likely to do harm to both the provider and receiver of the assistance. Providing relief when the situation calls for development means the receivers’ skills and resources are not utilized, which undermines the stewardship of their own lives and their communities. Relief (handouts) should only be applied when the receivers are unable to help themselves.
Therefore, our mandate as followers of Christ should be to ensure that each person who is capable of work has the opportunity to work. In a country like South Africa, which continues to battle with unemployment rates which are reported as being between 23 – 40% (depending on who you ask), the reality is, many people just can’t find jobs.
For this reason, the poor often have no choice but to turn to entrepreneurship. They must take some skill or talent they have and find a way to turn it into a business. The problem is, most have never run a business before and they struggle to know how to run a business a way that ensures a profit.
Sipho moved to Johannesburg from a rural part of South Africa with high hopes of employment. She needed to provide for her small twin boys after she lost her husband to AIDS. Upon arriving in the big city, she soon found that the place was teeming with job-seekers just like her and there were not nearly enough jobs for everyone.
After months of trying to find work, Sipho finally took stock of her skills and realised that she knew how to sew, and that she enjoyed doing it. She started making hats, scarves, tablecloths, children’s clothes––anything she could think of that people around her seemed to need.
Although Sipho sold her goods, she soon found that at the end of the month, she simply didn’t have the money she thought she had made. Having never run a business, she couldn’t make sense of it. Were her prices too low? Were her living expenses too high? Were people stealing from her? What was the problem?
Having no where to turn for help, Sipho became discouraged and soon turned to relying on handouts, skills and abilities unused, dignity lost, overwhelmed with shame.
Sadly, for all their hard work, many of the poor who become entrepreneurs actually lose money every month only because they lack basic business knowledge––how to find a target market, set prices with a mark-up that covers their costs, keep good records, issue invoices and receipts, etc. This gap of simple knowledge keeps them trapped in poverty, struggling to make a profit, falling into despair, feeling like a failure, without knowing where to gain the needed skills.
Down the road from Sipho was a well-meaning church, offering bread to the poor each Tuesday night. One volunteer, Steve, was an managing partner and accountant at a highly successful start-up company.
Every week, as he handed bread to Sipho and her two children, he felt a sting of guilt and uneasiness. He briefly knew her story, but no one had taken the time to find a way to empower her. Everyone was content to just give her bread, while her talents went unused in the prime of her life. He know that the bread only filled her family’s bellies for a few hours. It wasn’t actually changing her situation.
But Steve he knew a lot about business, banking and entrepreneurship. One night, on his way home, it hit him like a ton of bricks: His knowledge and her need could be matched!
Not only that, he realized that if he could get to know her––and others like her––as he taught them business, he could also introduce them to Christ! They did not have the opportunity to build long-term relationships while merely passing out bread.
Most people are capable of helping themselves. This does not mean we should do nothing to assist them, it just means that development, not relief, is the appropriate intervention. The development approach aims to avoid paternalism. This means we do not do things for people that they can do for themselves.
The goal of development is a process of walking with the materially poor so that they are better empowered to be stewards of their lives and communities, including their own material needs.
One program that offers that offers a solution like this is called Paradigm Shift. Paradigm Shift is a non-profit organization which has created a structured program for churches, Christian business forums and community organizations to use entrepreneurship as an avenue for ministry.
The Paradigm Shift programme combines practical business training with microloans, and couples that with structured biblical discipleship and personal mentoring.
Training, curriculum and easy-to-use tools are weaved together to intentionally equip volunteer teams to meet both the physical and spiritual needs of the poor who surround them in a way that empowers the poor to provide for themselves while beginning or growing in a relationship with Christ.
Many groups in Johannesburg, Pretoria, Cape Town and Durban are utilizing the Paradigm Shift program to match the skills of business professionals with the needs of the poor, and are transforming South Africa as they do.
What would it look like if every resourced church in every urban area of South Africa stopped giving handouts to those who were capable of working, and started offering effective, sustainable training program?
Note: Some concepts in this article were adapted from the book, When Helping Hurts by Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert.
There are over 5.5 million entrepreneurs in South Africa, with 67% being one-person operations. And as an entrepreneur, almost all rely on themselves to make their businesses work.
(Picture above Mirelle is operating a small business catering traditional Malawian food for buses that operate from Johannesburg to Lilongwe.)
Awareness of support for small business owners is extremely low with 74% of business owners unable to name any organization that gives help and advice to small businesses: 94% claim never to have used any support. Paradigm Shift partners have virtually an untapped market for outreach!
A great snapshot of entrepreneurship in South Africa is found in the FinScope 2010 South Africa Small Business Survey.
Ambitious and determined, Mwiza is a woman who turns life’s obstacles into opportunities. Originally from Malawi, she came to South Africa nearly four years ago to find work. Now, she is about to return home to Malawi to start her very own hair salon.
Mwiza had completed two years of university before she could no longer afford her tuition. And with an unemployment crisis in Malawi, finding a job was impossible. She’d had a son at the age of 16 and, even though her family was taking care of him, Mwiza knew that she was responsible for ensuring his future, which is why she left for South Africa in search of work.
Mwiza started cleaning homes when she arrived in Johannesburg, but she wanted more for herself and her son. One day, a friend invited her to attend service at a church that was offering the Paradigm Shift program to her community. The Sunday that Mwiza visited, the volunteer team at that church announced the start of the program. Mwiza knew then that her opportunity had come!
While attending the Paradigm Shift business training, Mwiza developed the idea for a hair salon business. She’d always had a talent for hair styling, but didn’t know how to turn her skills into a viable business. During the Paradigm Shift course, she learned about the importance of market research and choosing the right location for her business.
Mwiza also learned how to keep records and save her money. She created a savings plan for the hair salon she will be opening when she gets home. Each month she would buy one or two items and have them shipped back to Malawi. After three years of working faithfully towards her goal, Mwiza is ready to return home as the entrepreneur she was destined to become.
She will also become the mother she didn’t get the chance to be as a teenager. She plans to reunite with her son and take care of him once she becomes more financially stable. What sounds like a daunting road ahead brings nothing but excitement for Mwiza. She explains very simply, “I have God on my side. It will be ok.”
While many businessmen are lured by the prospect of making huge profits, Ernest is much more excited about the difference his business can make in his community.
Tenacious, hard-working and generous, Ernest moved to South Africa four years ago to escape the political climate of Zimbabwe. He now runs a cleaning and gardening service in Johannesburg.
As a former local government worker, Ernest struggled to find employment in 
South Africa. And so he turned to business to be able to provide for his family.
Ernest had just one lawn mower when he started a gardening service. But with determination to succeed, he saved money and soon expanded his business to include cleaning services.
When Ernest joined the Paradigm Shift program, he learned about the importance of making his business stand out from the competition, which in turn made his advertising more effective. And his sales have increased. However, success for Ernest is not measured by money, but by the social change he can spark.
“I don’t believe in having millions if I don’t give anything back. My business is only successful if it helps others,” he says.
After graduating from the Paradigm Shift course, Ernest gave “business classes” to his family and friends using the material he learned in the program. He also began mentoring and creating employment for boys in his community.
Now, Ernest is planning to launch a foundation that trains people in poverty to start a business. The Paradigm Shift business training gave Ernest the tools he needed to become a better businessman. But more than that, it inspired him to become a catalyst for change in his own community.
He explains, “The most important thing I learned is that I am only a custodian of what God has given me. And that is why I have to give back.”
To go from working as a parliamentarian to a security guard in less than one year speaks to the uncertainty of life, especially for those who’ve escaped war in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC).
Like many political refugees who come to South Africa, Jean Claude found himself in a new country with nothing but painful memories of a narrow escape from death.
Now the owner of a business that sells fish, Jean Claude is living testimony to the fact that it’s never too late to start over.
As a young law student in Kinshasa, DRC, Jean Claude dreamed of making a difference in his country. But an unstable economy cut his dreams short, and he could no longer afford the cost of his education.
Still determined to impact his community, he joined the youth league of his political party and worked his way up to a parliamentarian position.
But Jean Claude’s life quickly turned upside down when political turmoil broke out in the DRC. Once loved and well-respected in his country, he found himself a target for assassination. Just barely escaping death, Jean Claude and his family left everything behind and fled to South Africa.
But starting over in South Africa was difficult. Language barriers and a high unemployment rate meant that Jean Claude had to settle for work as a security guard. To make enough income, Jean Claude and his wife started a small business selling fish.
When Jean Claude joined the Paradigm Shift training program, he’d already registered the family business with the government, but had little knowledge about how to run it.
During the training, he learned to record both his indirect and direct costs, which helped him to make better business decisions. Now that he has more understanding of his true expenses, he has started to save for his family’s future.
While Jean Claude has high hopes for the future, he now believes that “We must put our dreams in the hand of God.” Jean Claude has grown both in his business and in his relationship with God. And for him, that was deepest value of the Paradigm Shift program.
On the one hand we are called to play the good Samaritan on life’s roadside; but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway.
True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it is not haphazard and superficial. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring.
- Martin Luther King
