23 Nov 2021

Marekisetso “The all-variety Market” adopts a customer-centric focus in developing and promoting indigenous cottage industries through quality interventions and services. 

Generally, these are small scale businesses run from someone’s home, especially one that involves a craft such as knitting, cosmetics or pottery etc. 

In an interview with BOPA, the Founder of Marekisetso Mr Rahman El-kindiy said the idea targeted small entities or shoestring industries that actually manufacture products from home with hope to find places for selling them.

Mr El-kindiy said that the challenge for these businesses often revolved around insufficient market access hence, the “Marekisetso Market” which he developed to bring businesses in one place for ease of trade. 

He highlighted that beyond this intervention they facilitated workshops for vendors to develop them through acquisition of linkages with supermarkets and any other buyer. 

 Furthermore, Mr El-kindiy said other seminars provided alongside the market were meant to furnish entities with business acumen on different subject matters relating to finance, marketing, sales, business protocols, subcontracting linkages, product development and branding to mention a few. 

All the arranged trainings would begin January 2022 and run throughout the year, said Mr El-kindiy.  

Notably, the founder added that the Marekisetso Market was now about three months old, having started with 20 stalls and now sitting at 55 stalls.

He said without doubt the market was becoming quite popular as many people have started to appreciate what they were offering.  “We are charging about P100 for a space of 3m x 3m, however, there is a lot of background marketing that we are doing for them through Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp,” he said.

Also, he said most of the work covered included producing promotional videos for marketing clients’ products as they go along. He said within a very short time they had accumulated well over  

4 000 followers.

Mr El-kindiy underlined that this was not just a market but, a foundation used to develop small  businesses established and run by Batswana.  He said that their interest was not to run a market with imported goods, but focused more on commodities produced locally. 

With this, he said, he hoped to develop aspiring entrepreneurs to setup and run sustainable businesses. 

Meanwhile, Mr El-kindiy stressed that during the wake of COVID-19 particularly, during  lockdown the SME’s were the hardest hit.

Interestingly, he underpinned that new ideas were developed around people as individuals had to find ways of surviving and making ends meet. 

Therefore, skills were gradually crafted among people as they were locked-in their homes, with some learning cooking patterns, making furniture and repurposing and recycling old gadgets, he said. 

He explained that this brought self-realization that Batswana do not need somebody else to bring something to them. “What we need is that we can actually create, even in a small scale and sell at the streets or market place to feed family and pay for one or two bills,” he said.

The flea market is scheduled every month end at the Cresta Lodge in Gaborone however, consultations were ongoing to assess chances of decentralizing services to other place around Botswana. ENDS