Hopefield and Cape Metro Business and Entrepreneurship Training

The Unit for Technical Assistance (UTA) was requested by the Western Cape Department of Agriculture (WCDoA) to appoint a Facilitator to conduct Business Management and Group Dynamics training for farmers in Hopefield and Cape Metro’s, Kraaifontein area. The aim for the Cape Metro training was to create a conducive environment under which all groups can work cohesively, as they are leasing farm portions from the same farmer. The group was constituted of 2 private companies and 1 cooperative. The group dynamics was especially relevant for the cooperative as they are the one group who would be very susceptible to within group conflict. Through this training, they would be able to identify conflict triggers and prevent it from happening and if it has happened, they would be in a better place to deal with it, or manage it as the case may be.

The same training had to be done in both English for the one group and IsiXhosa for the other group. This training received very positive reviews and the highest rankings on the evaluations that were done by the UTA to assess the effectiveness of both the content of the training and the facilitator’s capabilities in relation to the training content. In Hopefield the Livestock CPAC has identified an opportunity to support smaller growers of broilers, but link them to a single processing and marketing chain to ensure sustainability. The main aim of the Hopefield training was to capacitate the farmers so that they can ultimately negotiate for their own off-take agreement to supply broiler chickens to a Halaal certified abattoir within Hopefied. This group of participants had worked together before in a cooperative setup. However, since then, that arrangement has been dissolved as conflict ensued within the group. This led to most of the group members leaving and forming their own Private Companies. These companies are now set on signing off-take agreements with the Hopefield Abattoir to supply broiler chickens to the abattoir.