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Elliott and Katherine Stotler serve with The Mission Society in the Eastern Cape of South Africa. In one of the more impoverished areas of the country, Elliott and Katherine offer enrichment programs in preschool and primary schools, mentor youth, lead small business development training, and facilitate savings and credit associations as well as new church planting and encouraging local pastors.

Here, Katherine shares a new ministry program to aid small business owners and the ways it has impacted them.

One of the ministries God has called us to in South Africa is to help people develop successful small businesses. For the poor, a small business is a means of sustaining themselves and their families. We feel it is valuable to teach business skills to help South Africans thrive and be able to move beyond material poverty.

South Africa is ranked as one of the most unequal societies in the world – both economically and racially. The journey of overcoming poverty, unemployment, inequality, and broken relationships has been a lengthy and difficult road.

After researching small business development programs created for the South African context, we found Paradigm Shift. A core objective for the Paradigm Shift program is to empower the local church to reach out into the community in the name of Christ. The curriculum provides a balance of business skills and discipleship, addressing multiple facets of poverty. That’s one of the things that attracted us to this curriculum. 

There are vocational schools throughout South Africa teaching business skills similar to what our program offers, but individual lives are transformed and a nation is healed when that same information is shared in a supportive relationship and with the love of Christ!

We enlisted volunteers at a local church, Port Edward Methodist, and at a church in Bizana about 60 kilometers away, Arise and Shine Ministries, who hosted the training program. We have six facilitators, three from each ministry. The group is intentionally diverse, racially and economically, each with a story to tell. Together we trained, shared our knowledge with those in need and, most importantly, shared the reconciling love of Christ with those whom God has sent us to walk alongside.

The morning of the program, the attendees began to file into the corrugated tin church building in Bizana. Among them were street vendors, small neighborhood retailers, trades people, and the unemployed. They all had in common a desire to improve their small business or start a new small business.  

Elliott served as the lead facilitator, and each of the volunteers we had trained led sessions as well. The initial course offered is the Business Experience Course, and it serves as an introduction to a series of courses designed to empower the entrepreneurial poor. The program utilizes numerous teaching styles to reach learners of different levels of education with a variety of business types.

It was exciting to see the entrepreneurs immediately begin to apply the new skills to their business as we ended the day with a budgeting exercise. Most had never fully explored the importance of budgeting, savings, or the relationship between their business and personal finances. You could see the wheels turning as they recognized opportunities for improving their businesses. Their enthusiasm was amazing! 

At the end of the day, we explained to the attendees that there would be follow-up courses in which they could dig deeper into all of the skills that they had been introduced to that day. There would also be a mentoring program, in which participants could partner with an experienced business person who would share knowledge and encourage them as they work to strengthen their businesses. The response was very positive as the attendees realized that this was not just a one-time event, but rather a relationship in which we will journey together as each business owner seeks his or her full potential.