Zambia Needs Enterprise Development Model—Expert

A MALAYSIAN enterprise development expert has said that Zambia needs to come up with a model of enterprise development that combines capitalist and cooperative models in order to promote balanced development.

Daing Ibrahim said in Lusaka last week that Zambia had a chance to develop entrepreneurs and balance the development industry between rural and urban areas.

He said Zambia and Malaysia have a similar socio-economic history and the latter had dedicated to the development of entrepreneurs through a balanced model that incorporated capitalist and cooperative models.

The expert, who coined the model for the Malaysian government said the earlier capitalist model that his government had implemented had not yielded desired results, because it did not promote a balanced development of a cadre of entrepreneurs.

“For quite some time we spent a lot of money to develop entrepreneurs. But we had a problem of sustainability of the entrepreneurs.

“Another problem that we had was that we were developing entrepreneurs individually, and to sustain the existence of the entrepreneurs in the market was problematic, because we had a problem of monitoring them,” he said.

The cooperative model is focused on developing graduate entrepreneurs to feed into operations of identified lead entrepreneurs, who could have the market but were unable to satisfy it.

And University of Zambia (UNZA) senior economics lecturer, Chiselebwe Ng’andwe, said enterprise development in Zambia had been failing because of the lack of commercial support to the cause.

Dr Ng’andwe said financial institutions in Zambia had not been supportive of the development of entrepreneurs because there was little credit going to entrepreneurship development programmes.

He also said there was a strong correlation between education and entrepreneurship development, and hoped the Enterprise Development Centre that UNZA and the University of Malaysia plan to establish could assist in the development of entrepreneurs to feed the industry in Zambia.