Black Pound Day – a successful initiative?
According to some widely circulated figures on the internet, the lifespan of a dollar in the Asian ‘community’ is 28 days, 19 days in the Jewish community and, in the African-American community, 6 hours. The scare quotes around the word ‘community’ will at once point to a glaring problem with these numbers (and there are a few problems – not least the elusive source of the data). Nonetheless, the thrust of the argument put forward is sound and based on robust data – we need to find a way to overcome economic racial inequalities. One solution in operation is Black Pound Day. Has it worked?
What is Black Pound Day?
Black Pound Day is a noble initiative that started on 27 June 2020 and takes place every month, on the first Saturday of the month. The initiative was the brainchild of musician DJ Swiss of So Solid Crew fame, who imagined it as a way to stimulate growth within the UK’s Black-owned business economy by encouraging the public to buy products and services from Black-owned businesses.
Reliable data regarding economic racial inequalities do exist. In the UK, only 0.067 per cent of UK businesses are Black-owned (just 5 per cent have a BAME owner). Another arresting statistic is that although Britain’s Black community has an annual spending power estimated at £300, just 3 per cent is reinvested into the community. A joint 2019 study by the state-owned British Business Bank and the consulting firm Oliver Wyman revealed that the average annual revenue for a Black entrepreneur was £10,000 less than it was for a White entrepreneur. The total wealth (property, investments etc) for a median household classified as White is £313,900 – for a Black Caribbean household it’s £85,900 and for a Black African household it’s £34,000, according to National Statistics Agency estimates. Another difficulty is access to funding – under 1% of venture capital investment in the UK went to Black entrepreneurs across the last 10 years, according to a report by Extend Ventures, highlighting the systemic barriers Black businesses face when trying to get hold of financing. It is the cumulative impact of data such as these that has fuelled initiatives such as Black Pound Day (BPD).
Has Black Pound Day helped businesses?
There have been critics of BPD – although most of the criticisms I have seen have been straw man ones – for example, that the initiative is discriminatory (nowhere have I heard it said that Black people should only buy their goods from Black-owned brands; if you’re tempted to see it that way, think of it instead as a concerted way to invest in Black-owned enterprises so they, too, can not merely survive, but thrive). But there are real concerns: Swiss himself acknowledges that his initiative was as a way to redirect the energy generated by the Black Lives Matter protests positively but that emotions run their course – before long there’s a return to the status quo. In other words, how do you keep up the momentum, absent headlines of race-based protests?
So has BPD worked? The testimonials on the Black Pound Day website speak for themselves – from individuals of all races who support the movement. Business after business participating in the initiative has reported increased sales on BPD – Afrocenchix, a haircare company, experiences strong increases in sales every month on Black Pound Day and has had to take on additional staff as a result. For many businesses, the increased sales have been maintained, ie not reverted to pre-protest-level sales. A corollary to the BPD movement has been the growth in the number of Black-owned online business directories, including the directory within pan-African.
Initiatives such as Black Pound Day are simple solutions to complex problems and it will take some time and deep analysis to evaluate their impact. Old habits are hard to break, too – sales may well increase for Black enterprises on BPD but how do the owners of these businesses invest their money?
Pioneers of initiatives such as Black Pound Day are at least having a go, and I applaud them.
What are your ideas for stimulating the Black-owned economy? We welcome thoughtful opinion.
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