Encouraging people to become employers is one of the key elements to the growth of the private sector and the fostering of the entrepreneurial spirit. - Margaret Mwanakatwe

When the procedures for starting a business and the licenses are expensive with tedious procedures, entrepreneurs avoid that cost by operating informally.

If we do not position our industry to become a key regional player, we will be faced with high levels of imports into our country, which can lead to the death of local industry.

We should be signing another bilateral agreement with Angola, a country that hasn’t definitively entered COMESA yet. Trade between our countries is once more a normal tariff. When we sign this agreement we will be able to ensure that our industry here will have an export market. That bilateral agreement puts Zambia at an advantage because we can’t get our products into that market on a duty-free basis at the moment. Angola doesn’t produce much, and they want everything from Zambia: rice, sugar, fruits, vegetables and they also want chickens and eggs. They want everything, and here we are. If we can build up the capacity within our industries, we are able to use Angola as a market.