I have previously argued that "missing middle" describes as an accident what was in fact engineered.
This piece asks a harder question: missing from whose account? Because in the townships I grew up in, and still work in, nothing was ever missing - except formal recognition.
Start with a scene apartheid's economists never bothered to model.
A mother leaves home before five in the morning to be at the "madam's" house by six. Her infant stays behind — not alone, but with another mother on the same street, who is feeding and minding three or four other children alongside her own that day, and will again tomorrow, and will be minded for in turn when it's her shift at another house.
No contract records this arrangement. No regulator licenses it. No bank extends credit against it. And yet it is, in every functional sense, an economy: labour is exchanged, risk is pooled, trust substitutes for collateral, and reciprocity — not a court — enforces the deal.
This was not an isolated kindness. It was infrastructure, and it ran on the same logic as the stokvel that covered a funeral, the burial society that paid out within days when no insurer would touch an informal income, the neighbour who extended maize meal on credit until payday.
Apartheid's labour system compelled Black women into the homes of white families for wages that could not, on their own, reproduce a Black household — let alone a Black community. What filled that gap was not a state programme. It was us, filling it for each other, at scale, for generations, with a sophistication that has never been properly priced.
I have watched this same system underwrite a business, not just a household, and I want to describe it plainly because it is the clearest evidence I have that this is infrastructure, not improvisation.
I once needed premises for a coffee business and wanted the morning commuter volume that only a taxi rank could give me. I approached the busiest rank in the area and asked to lease space.
What followed was not a credit application. It was an interview: what kind of coffee, how was mine different from the woman who already traded there, because the association was not willing to place two competitors on top of each other and starve one to feed the other. They asked to taste it. I was approved on that basis.
What they asked for next tells you everything about how differently this system prices trust. Not my ID. Not a lease deposit calculated against a credit score. My clan name. I was allocated a vacant container on the rank, on reasonable terms, with weekly insurance collected at the rank — R50 a week — covering real cover, with a real claims process. If I was robbed, I was told to bring one quotation for replacement stock to the rank's cashier, and I would be paid out in cash, on the spot.
Sit with the underwriting logic there, because it is not the same discipline Western finance practices wearing informal clothing — it is a different discipline entirely.
A conventional insurer prices against risk: it calculates the probability you will be robbed, and charges you a premium proportional to that probability, whether or not it ever lifts a finger to make the robbery less likely.
The taxi association was not pricing my risk.
It was managing it — controlling who traded where, keeping competitive pressure from turning neighbours into predators, maintaining enough order on the rank itself that the probability of the robbery fell in the first place.
One system prices the odds of harm. The other lowers them. I would go further: theirs is the more sophisticated actuarial mind, because it treats the loss event as something to be prevented, not merely priced.
This is what I mean when I say the solidarity economy was never missing, only unrecognised.
It has its own credit assessment — reputation and craft, tasted and judged on the spot, not extracted from a bureau. Its own identity verification — clan name, which ties you to a lineage of accountability no ID number carries. Its own insurance product — priced, funded and paid out within a system small enough to trust and large enough to absorb the loss.
Every function a modern financial system claims as sophisticated — underwriting, identity, risk mitigation, market incubation — was already operating on that taxi rank, built and administered entirely by people the formal financial sector still describes, without irony, as "unbanked."
That word deserves the same scrutiny I gave "missing middle" previously.
Unbanked implies absence. What I experienced on that rank was a banking system the formal sector has simply refused to recognise as one — because recognising it would mean admitting that township communities, under conditions designed to prevent exactly this, built functioning financial and business infrastructure anyway, and in some respects built it better.
This matters for where we go next, not just where we've been.
Any conversation about "innovative financing" for township economies that does not start by asking what already works, and by whom it was built, will keep re-inventing instruments that already exist in another form — badly, and without the trust the original version took generations to earn.
The solidarity economy is not a heritage story to be honoured once a year.
It is a functioning system that predates, outlasted, and in places quietly out-performs the one that excluded it. The task now is not to replace it. It is to capitalise it, on its own terms.
* Vusi Vokwana writes a weekly column for The National called Kasi Brief. She is the Founding Director of Kasi Catalyst, a township innovation and advisory platform based in Cape Town, and Secretary General of NAFCOC (2008) at national level. She has over 20 years of direct practice in township and rural markets across South Africa, spanning private banking, fuel retail, and enterprise development, and has secured title deeds for 150 commercially zoned properties in Langa, Gugulethu, and Nyanga over the past decade.
**The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Media Group.