Consumer Education

Many positive strides have been made in further streamlining our approach to consumer education. We have engaged the services of an expert in the area of consumer education and we have developed a new strategy and material, dubbed ‘Double Impact’, which we will use for consumer education going forward.

The Double Impact approach is designed to have a dual effect: firstly, to train consumers, and secondly, by having those who we train − such as credit provider staff − share the information with others, such as customers, family and friends. In this way those who we train will further spread the information they have received.

A big emphasis will also be placed on Train-the-Trainer workshops, where we will be training selected Non-Government Organisations (NGOs) and Non-Profit Organisations (NPOs), with the aim of these organisations imparting this knowledge to the communities in which they work.

In preparing and working on our proposed strategy, a decision was made to halt general consumer awareness workshops while we are in the process of finalising the new consumer education material. We hope to resume with full-on workshops in the next quarter.

Our office has been taking part in the Micro Finance South Africa (MFSA) road shows. We have thus far visited to five provinces with the MFSA and will continue to accompany them around the country until the road shows are completed.

This quarter, we conducted a total of 19 workshops in five different provinces.