Entrepreneurship in Africa: Part 3 in a Series
LUSAKA, ZAMBIA – Pamela Polla, who is in her late 20s, says she wanted to be an independent woman, capable of supporting herself and contributing to her family. So she started her own business.
Of medium height and brown in complexion, Polla is married with three kids. They live in Choma, a town in Zambia’s Southern province.
Two of Polla’s children are in primary school, and the third one is expected to start school soon. She says she started her own business to help educate them, contribute to her family and support her single mother.
“I had to start a business to support my children[’s] education, as well as help to solve a lot of challenges we were facing at home,” she says. “Sometimes my husband’s salary was not enough to meet our daily needs.”
Her husband works as a bus driver. Using the money he would give her to buy food for the family, she started her own business. She began making ice pops and selling them at 100 kwacha ZMK (2 cents USD) each.
Polla, who had no business training or experience, says it was not easy at first to find customers for her business. She says she also didn’t have the capital to start a more respected business so she faced a lot of opposition from her neighbors.
“I had to face stigma from the society,” she says. “I became a disgrace to my neighbors because the business I was doing did not meet their expectation. My neighbors who knew about my husband[’s] employment did not expect me to put a bucket full of ice blocks on my head and start roaming the streets selling.”
Polla also says that some men tried to take advantage of her while she was working.
“It became a challenge to persevere with the business on the streets,” she says. “Some men thought I was selling my body instead of my products. Some men would buy my ice blocks, [but] in the end start confessing love to me. They even gave us names, which symbolized that we were prostitutes and not businesswomen.”
But Polla says she didn’t give up, concentrating instead on her goal of contributing to her family.
“But I persisted until I made enough capital to order some bedding, such as bedspreads, which gave me at least enough to help my family,” she says.
Polla says she would have loved to acquire money from local lending institutes to enhance her business, but she has distanced herself from them because of the negative experiences that her other friends in business have had with them.
“I have not been able to access any loans from the lending companies or banks because of the hostile way my friends were treated,” she says.
Women in Zambia say they received training and encouragement on how to become entrepreneurs or develop their businesses last month during the Month of the Woman Entrepreneur. Various organizations offered free workshops for the women and advocated for access to funding for them from banks and lending companies. Despite the challenges they face, women entrepreneurs here say they are determined to keep striving for independence and raise their standards of living through business.
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