Brazilian university launches e-commerce platform to boost black economy

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Zumbi dos Palmares University in São Paulo has launched the ShopBlack e-commerce platform, an online store selling products and services to black small business entrepreneurs. The tool emerges as an alternative in the current economic crisis context, with high unemployment and a reduced emergency aid.

According to José Vicente, dean of the university and project developer, the goal is to empower and boost entrepreneurship among the university’s students, their relatives, and the black community in general.

“We have been researching this perspective of community economic circularity for a long time, that is, the possibility of money circulating among the community. And we then worked on the assumption that this can develop among the black community, buying and selling among their own, thereby generating resources to strengthen the community itself and community businesses and entrepreneurs,” Vicente explained.

Pandemic

He said that the plan was to have a physical space, but the pandemic led the project to be launched in the virtual environment. The impacts of the pandemic on the black population’s income also spurred the project.

“We had been working on this [community economy] perspective because of the economic challenges already being faced. Over the past 5 years the economy has experienced serious challenges and this has mainly affected the underprivileged class, the most vulnerable class, of which blacks are the great majority,” he said.

The university began to structure the project thinking about providing a solution to the lack of jobs and to black people’s obstacles in accessing higher positions in the job market.

“When the pandemic came we said ‘now, more than ever, such a tool is essential,’ considering that the pandemic situation, again, affected and impacted black people more directly.”

The e-commerce platform aims to encourage the black community to foster business creation, to interact, and to promote buying and selling among themselves. “We have almost 2,000 students here now, if they are the first to practice this kind of approach, we will be able to expand this in a highly qualified way.”

The private university, named after a famous 17th century Black community leader in Palmares, Pernambuco, was created in 2003, and is designed to promote the increased participation in universities among Brazil’s black community, similar to the historically black colleges in the U.S., such as Howard University.