A new women’s cooperative at Suva Municipal Market has taken its first concrete step to move vendors out of stalls and into formal enterprises, with members breaking ground on a restaurant and bakery early this month. The Suva Market Inspiring Women Cooperative, founded and led by long‑time market vendor Sofia Talei, aims to turn the collective savings and experience of market women into larger, more stable businesses that support families and create new livelihoods.
Talei, 41, who has sold produce at Suva Municipal Market for 17 years, said the cooperative grew from her desire to see women vendors diversify beyond tabletop sales. “I started selling in the market with bags of coconuts sent by my parents from home,” she said, describing how the market became an essential source of income to help her family. Now a mother of three, she said the cooperative is her next step after years at the market and follows a personal journey from small‑scale vendor to entrepreneur. Her husband today works as a manager in auditing, a change she attributes in part to the family’s steady efforts in business.
The cooperative brings together women who have taken part in savings and empowerment programmes and are ready to scale up. Talei credited the United Nations Development Programme and local initiatives such as the Save a Place programme with introducing the cooperative concept and supporting market vendors to think beyond traditional selling. “Since I grew up in the village, I thought cooperatives were only for villages to support village people,” she said. “But after it was introduced to us, I decided to give it a try here at the Suva Market and form a women’s cooperative.”
Members say the cooperative model will allow them to pool resources, access training, and pursue ventures they could not fund individually. The restaurant and bakery — the cooperative’s first major projects — are intended both to provide a steady income stream for members and to create employment opportunities for market families. Groundbreaking earlier this month marked the start of construction, with Talei describing the ventures as emblematic of a broader push to encourage vendors to “not put your eggs in one basket.”
Organisers emphasise the initiative’s focus on business diversification and long‑term financial resilience. Many vendors at Suva Municipal Market rely on daily sales that are vulnerable to seasonality and market disruptions; cooperative leaders say formal businesses can stabilise income and provide avenues for value‑adding, such as preparing meals or baking goods from produce sold at market stalls. The cooperative also plans to build on existing savings groups that have already empowered members to invest in small-scale growth.
The Suva initiative adds to a growing recognition in Fiji of the role of cooperatives and savings‑led groups in women’s economic empowerment. Market leaders hope the Suva Market Inspiring Women Cooperative will serve as a model for other markets in the capital and around the country, demonstrating how collective action and support from development partners can convert informal trading experience into established enterprises. Talei has urged members to embrace new opportunities while maintaining ties to the market that shaped them: “Don’t just focus on what you sell on your table — when you diversify, that is when you become a successful businessperson in the future.”