Narcissistic Acts: Managing Businesses of Fringe Benefits in Sudan!
Alaa Babiker
citizenoutlet2022@gmail.com
Lately the world has gone through very difficult times. After the corona virus everything chanced, the air we breathe, the food we eat, and the every day work we do, it all changed. That is at a global level, at a regional level, where Sudan exists, we see different types of work in the country have been affected with the virus spread and the partial lock down that was imposed, but the most affected populations are those who are managing small fringe businesses. Fringe in business is considered an extra benefit, but in Sudan many of the population work and manage only Fringe Businesses as their main source of income! And that is challenging for many families. The money earned from these small businesses is barely enough to cover every day’s main expenses like food, electricity, and drink. But the Sudani man has learnt how to always figure it out, he has learned that difficult situations make you come up with different solutions.
The fact that Fringe Business in Sudan brings little money is absolutely not true. In the past, there were plenty of small businesses considered Fringe, and many of graduated Sudanese youths considered themselves more sophisticated to work at them, but the continuous occurrence of jobless youth status who are reliant on their families causing the family and the country’s economy to retardation, have helped making these youths to wake, search, and manage small businesses. If we took a deeper look now, we see that many medical graduates, engineers, trade and science graduates are working at small fringe businesses, and that is all due to the presence of over-graduates every year and the limited numbers of jobs available!
Let us try to solve this rising issue and think about how can we improve fringe businesses in Sudan. The first thing to be done is having to prioritize the issue of newly jobless graduates. A governmental program is to be initiated specially for them, where head officials are to establish training facilities for the participation of new graduates to learn new skills and experiences at their specialization. Then comes the government role in choosing employees for jobs on base of merit, not on the base of “I know his father”.
The last important solution is to listen to the people who work at fringe businesses, many of them are university graduates who have certificates that qualify them to be positioned at regular jobs. And many others have high school certificates and are ambitious to go to a good university but lack the financial support. In this regard it is very important to concentrate on education and establish an Education Support Program so that every young person finishes his study and achieve his dream.
In the end, I humbly ask government officials, specially who work at the Ministry of Education, to focus more on improving education in Sudan. We have great youths, and their future in business depends on education, we don’t want to see them managing Fringe Businesses where they can work at better places.