WORKSHOP TO SUPPORT AUKI MARKET VENDORS ENDED
Fish sold at the Auki market. Photo credit: Radio New Zealand.
A series of workshops to support Auki market vendors have ended yesterday with encouraging plans to strengthen vendors’ voices in market governance and enable positive changes for everyone.
The “Getting Started” workshops, are the first of its kind-aiming to bring market vendors together and assist them organise.
Participants identify priorities and form an action plan to help ensure the marketplace is safe, clean, inclusive and good for trading.
The action plan identifies steps needed to establish a market vendors association and various strategies to ensure it represents all market vendors.
The dominance of rural and urban women market vendors in marketplaces makes it essential that women are supported to participate and take on leadership positions in marketplace groups, as well as provided with opportunities to speak up about the specific hardships they face in their everyday work.
The project will also focus on supporting marketplace groups, market management, and local government to work meaningfully with each other on making improvements to marketplaces.
Almost 50 of the 59 participants were women, reflecting the fact that between 75 and 90 percent of market vendors across the country are women.
The workshops are part of UN Women’s Markets for Change Project which was officially launched last month.