UN Women launches toolkit for vendors

THE United Nations Women has launched the Women’s Economic Market Toolkit to address problems market vendors face and how they can manage, improve and run their activity as a business.
UN representative Themba Kalua said the toolkit would ensure markets were managed in a more responsible and sustainable way ensuring that they
were safe and conducive for everyone.
“Markets provide trading opportunities for more than 80 per cent of ordinary Papua New Guineans, 60 per cent of which are women,” he said.
Kalua said markets were economic hubs that supplied food, income for families, opportunities for local and provincial authorities, informal and social interactions for communities.
He said markets provided a significant contribution to the local economies and was a source of livelihood for an estimated 40,000 women venders across the country who benefited directly from markets.
National Capital District social services director Jeneth Haua told The National that the toolkit would go a long way to helping markets in the capital city address their main problem of capacity for food storage.
“At the moment, mothers leave their food where they sell them so hopefully this programme will help us find a solution so we can solve our storage (issues) in the market,” she said. UN programme manager Brenda Andrias said the toolkit could be used by anyone who ran a market that covered managing the business, space, security, waste, infrastructure and financial management.
She said the toolkit was for all the markets that came under their Meri projects programme, however, they were open to help other markets who were not part of their programme as well.
She said the programme was supported by the Department for Community Development, Youth and Religion and UN Women.