Womens’ Innovative Empowerment Network (WIEN) group operations director Junaida Hamid has called on Malaysians to support these community bazaars, as many entrepreneurs had no choice but to come on board for survival due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Community bazaars are markets where home-grown businesses can come together in a friendly environment to sell and promote their products.

The homemade products include food and beverages, personal care products, clothes, personal accessories, toys, handicraft and other artisan products.

Junaida told FMT that she and her team would organise community bazaars around the Klang Valley for local entrepreneurs who had just started business.

She added that training programmes would be provided to these vendors to help them improve their sales.

“At first it was about passion, but now it is also about survival. You see many entrepreneurs thinking about how they are going to survive if this new normal continues.

“We started WIEN to provide a platform and give opportunities to micro-enterprises especially women entrepreneurs, to grow and develop their businesses after the movement control order ended.

“The organisation wants to empower vendors to learn creative ways to market their products and gain financial independence,” said Junaida at a Ramadan community market event.

Also present at the event was Bukit Gasing assemblyman Rajiv Rishyakaran who said the community bazaars were important to give entrepreneurs a chance to showcase their work as they were local “product creators”.

“It takes a lot of work for these entrepreneurs to make their own products and I find that admirable,” he said.

Rajiv added the government should help them expand their market on a larger scale to huge hypermarkets or even overseas.

“Although the government is giving them money, which is necessary to scale up manufacturing, it must also provide these entrepreneurs with expertise on how to upscale their products to a large audience,” he said.