Stokvels and Livelihoods of Black Women Street Vendors in Urban South Africa

This paper looks at the productive work of Black women when they became entrepreneurs in the informal sector to create sustainable livelihoods for themselves under precarious conditions. The urban setting of South Africa is the site of the study. The economy of this African country provides little hope for the working class to survive, and Black women are at the bottom of every human development index in this context. However, these working-class Black women have decided not to take these characterisations about themselves lying down. They have risen up and decided to become street vendors to make ends meet. We also show that this form of entrepreneurship is not only survivalist, as some scholarship tends to postulate, but it is also sustainable and investment-savvy. Stokvels, in this case, are one of the investment arms that these Black women street vendors have created to grow their collective earnings. We utilise a Marxist-Feminist framework as our eyepiece to look through the study, and the critical narrative interpretation approach helps us to elucidate our data.