In many communities, the story of entrepreneurship often starts with the need to address a challenge. For Memory Sibanda Muzi, the challenge was to get herself and her family out of poverty and to ensure her children have access to education, dignity, and a better life than she had when she started.
Memory is a mother of five – three daughters and two sons - living in Nyankanga community of Chisamba District, Central Province. Her household carries both the joy and pressure that come with nurturing a large family in a context where the parent does not have formal employment. Two of her children have already completed school, while three are still in education, a reality that drives her daily hustle.
“I have a family of five children,” she explains simply, though the weight behind the words is anything but simple. “Some have finished school, and others are still in school, and I have to provide for all of them.”
This reality in Memory’s life is what shaped her ambition as an entrepreneur. Her story is not one of sudden success or inherited advantage. It is a gradual unfolding shaped by observation, experimentation and a willingness to solve problems using what is available. In 2019, Memory and her family began seriously engaging in farming as a way to improve their livelihoods. What started as a modest attempt to keep chickens has since grown into a more integrated agricultural enterprise that now combines poultry production with sunflower cultivation and oil processing.
At the heart of her business are various types of fowls: broilers, layers, ‘village’ chicken and turkeys. Poultry farming, however, as she discovered, carries both opportunity and challenge. On one hand, the demand for poultry products is steady, and the returns can be promising. On the other hand, the costs associated with production, particularly feed, can easily undermine profitability.
Like many small-scale farmers, Memory found that feed was the biggest barrier to scaling her business. The more chickens she kept, the more feed she needed and the more expensive it became to sustain production. It was a cycle that threatened to limit growth and trap her enterprise at a subsistence level.
"The main challenge was feed,” she recalls. “It is very costly when you are keeping chickens.”
Instead of accepting this as an unavoidable constraint, Memory began to look for alternatives within her own environment. That search for solutions led her to sunflowers, a crop that would ultimately transform the logic of her entire farming system.
Her idea was simple but would eventually prove to be powerful. Sunflowers could be grown and processed into cooking oil, helping her create a direct source of income. At the same time, the by-product of that process, the sunflower cake, could be used as a nutritious and affordable feed for chickens. In one decision, she saw the possibility of solving two problems at once: generating income and reducing feed costs.
For Memory, this was a practical response to lived experience. The more she studied the idea, the more it made sense for her household. Sunflowers did not require heavy investment in fertiliser or expensive inputs, making them relatively accessible for small-scale farmers. Labour was the main cost, and in a family-based farming system, even that could be managed collectively.
“We thought about how we can manage the feed problem,” she explains. “That is when we decided to invest in sunflowers and the machine that extracts oil. We wanted to make sure we can produce the feed for our chickens.”
The purchase of a sunflower oil extraction machine marked a turning point in the business. It allowed Memory and her family to move beyond raw farming into value addition. They transformed harvested seeds into multiple products. The machine would extract oil from sunflower seeds, while the remaining cake is repurposed as animal feed. Nothing is wasted, and every harvest carries multiple layers of value.
On a good day, Memory’s operation would produce between 20 and 30 litres of cooking oil. For a small-scale family business, this output was impressive and represents stability.
The integration of sunflower farming and poultry production created a circular system within the household economy. The chickens provide income and food security, while the sunflowers provide both cash and feed. The two systems support each other, reducing dependency on external outputs.
Over time, this approach has allowed Memory’s family to gradually improve their livelihood. The business has now been running for six years. Although growth has not been without challenges, it has provided a steady foundation for household needs, including school-related expenses for her children.
However, like many small entrepreneurs, Memory’s journey is not without its limitations. The most pressing one she faces today is market access. While she is able to sell her products locally, she believes the business could grow significantly if there were stronger, more consistent markets for unknown sunflower oil producers and poultry products.
“Our challenge is marketing,” she admits. “Locally, we manage to sell, but we would like to reach more people.”
This challenge reflects a broader reality faced by many rural and peri-urban producers: the ability to produce does not always translate into the ability to sell at scale. Without access to wider markets, transportation systems, or structured buyers, small enterprises often remain confined to their immediate surroundings, limiting their growth potential.
Despite these obstacles, Memory continues to push forward with determination. Her business is not only an income-generating activity but also a learning process, one that continues to evolve with each season, each harvest, and each cycle of production.
What makes her story particularly compelling is the way it connects family life, survival, and entrepreneurship into a single narrative. For Memory, farming is not separate from motherhood; it is an extension of it. Every decision she makes in the business is ultimately tied to her children’s wellbeing and future opportunities.
Her enterprise also reflects a quiet form of innovation that often goes unnoticed in discussions about economic development. There are no large factories or formal investors involved. Instead, there is observation, adaptation, and the creative use of available resources. Sunflowers become oil. Oil production becomes feed. Feed sustains poultry. Poultry supports education. Each component strengthens the next.
As she looks ahead, Memory remains focused on growth, particularly in expanding her market reach and strengthening the sustainability of her business. But even as she thinks about expansion, her grounding remains the same: her family, her children, and the desire to build something that lasts beyond immediate survival.
In many ways, Memory’s journey illustrates what resilience looks like in practice. It is not the absence of challenges, but the ability to continuously respond to them with creativity and persistence. It is the decision to turn a constraint into a system, and a system into a livelihood.
Such stories are what the Zambian Governance Foundation continues to facilitate within our communities. To get them to recognise that the journey of empowerment starts with individual community members: at household level, at village group level, at cooperative level, at collective community group level. These are the transformative stories that get told when civil society organisations resolve to put communities at the centre of development. To move communities from beneficiary mindsets to those that pursue lasting change.
If you would like to contribute to this discussion, please do so via info@zgf.org.zm
