Is there hope for small businesses in Zambia?

Hope? To start with, it takes courage to start a small business in Zambia. The odds are against you from the word go. You lack business management and entrepreneurship skills, the cost of business is primitively prohibitive, and most dreaded, access to affordable financing is none existent; the cost of finance is so high its hard to imagine success. But the small business still sets off.

So the question, “Is there hope for people who are already going against the odds?” is an oxymoron. In a sense, small businesses in Zambia have mastered the skill of turning their challenges into opportunity. Their hardships are their stepping-stones.

Like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said of the civil movement in America, “hewn a stone of hope out of a mountain of despair.”

“The small business owner is the embodiment of hope.” My claim.

The tax laws in Zambia are draconian, designed as though to ensure that the small business is aborted. The tax a small business will pay on a used car in Zambia is enough to buy a brand new car in the United States. The cost of transport and the cost of communication are perched to delink small businesses from the very systems that should prescribe them the very light of day. Because of tax and transport cost, various items in Zambia, for instance, are 300% more expensive than in neighboring Tanzania. But small businesses never give up hope.

You see they may not hope in the chance of a better business environment, but they hope in their own power to overcome the challenges that face them. They may not hope in their government’s policies to favor their cause because it does not. But they hope in their skills and in their competencies. They are motivated by their own pain and needs. Instead of fearing failure, they believe in success regardless.

But I wonder what it could be like, how much prosperity we could create, if government became genuinely proactive in ensuring that the roadblocks to entrepreneurial success are terminated once and for all. I fancy the marketplace in Zambia where the financial systems are developed well enough to close the loopholes of loan defaults and hence affording to give corporate credit at manageable rates and conditions.

But even if all of my day dreaming ends up less than a thought in the world of silence, the small business in Zambia still has no choice but to succeed. That is why I have dedicated my life to work with SMEs. It is not because they need me to give them hope. It is because they give me hope that someday they will usher in economic emancipation when the floodgates of small business development reach the level where they will no longer be ignored.

Of course there is hope for small businesses in Zambia.