Flash, retail technology service provider and a subsidiary of Pepkor has partnered with the DG Murray Trust to launch a R2m electronic food voucher system to approximately 7,000 vulnerable households in five food insecure communities in South Africa.
It has been selected as an ‘essential services provider’ during the lockdown as it enables low-income communities and at-risk individuals to purchase essentials like electricity, airtime, data and make bill payments via its 172,000 Flash shops, which serves 24 million customers monthly.
“With more than nine-million school-going children unable to access the daily nutritious meals they received through the country’s national school nutrition programme, the CoCare system overcomes distribution, security and targeting challenges that make delivering vital food support to the most vulnerable in our society so problematic,” commented Ross Norton, Director at Flash.
The CoCare Pilot Project was developed and funded by Flash.It was successfully implemented in Ceres by non-profit organization, The Development Action Group (DAG) earlier this month and will be ongoing. The system channels essential food aid in the form of a voucher to vulnerable households and beneficiaries via participating Flash retailers and spaza shops.
The project originally targeted 1,000 food-insecure households living on or close to the breadline, the Project reported an 80% redemption rate within one week of the CoCare electronic voucher being delivered to beneficiaries’ mobile phones.
In partnership with GrowGreat, food security advocacy and support NPO, Flash will be providing access to its network of registered community-based organisations in the five identified communities in the Eastern Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, Mpumalanga and Limpopo provinces. Phase One of the CoCare Programme will target between 1,000 and 1,500 people in each region, providing one R150 CoCare Voucher per household to be used on food and hygiene essentials, redeemable within seven days.
“As a means to help protect the South African economy and stimulate recovery after the Lockdown, the CoCare Food Voucher Programme can be extended into a discounted or subsidised offering on basic essential products, also providing liquidity into micro, small and medium enterprises that form the lifeblood of our economy, “adds Norton.
CoCare branding will be placed outside participating Flash shops with the invitation to those registered under the initiative to redeem their vouchers. Once registered, the beneficiary will be issued with a unique voucher number that’s redeemable for food and other essential items at any participating Flash shop.
“Right now, our emergency response to the Covid-19 epidemic is to provide support to those who are excluded from mainstream efforts to protect against the spread of Covid-19 and to mitigate its impacts. We are proud to be associated with a programme that directly strengthens household food security by putting an electronic food voucher into the hands of the most at-risk individuals in targeted communities,” said Dr David Harrison, chief executive officer of DG Murray Trust.
