The Suva City Council has teamed up with Vodafone Fiji in a bid to promote cashless payments at the Suva Municipal Market.
Suva-Lami special administrators chairman Isimeli Tikoduadua said the agreement signed with Vodafone would mean the market vendors would be able to use the M-PAiSA platform to make their payments such as stall fees.
Mr Tikoduadua said using the digital payment system would also take away the time consuming task of manually collecting the cash from the market vendors and minimise the risk of thefts.
Vodafone is expected to start training the market vendors on how to use the digital payment platform and it will be done in phases.
According to Mr Tikoduadua there are about 1000 stalls at the Suva market and the first phase of the training and awareness will begin with the permanent market vendors.
“It will come with its set of challenges but we will be addressing those challenges as the phase proceeds,” he said.
Suva United Market Vendors Association’s legal adviser and secretary Shobna Verma said it was a good initiative but it would be challenging to change the mindset of most of the market vendors at the market.
Ms Verma said most of the market vendors were elderly who believed in the old methods of payment and handling money and it could prove challenging for them.
However she said the training provided by the Vodafone Fiji team could change their mindset and encourage them to use the digital payment platform.
Vodafone Fiji’s head of e-Commerce, Shailendra Prasad said they were having discussions with other municipalities to come on board and encourage the use of the digital payment system.
