On paper, a Zambian cleaning firm has never been better placed. Cleaning is a reserved sector under Statutory Instrument No. 22 of 2019, meaning public and large private contracts are meant to go to local companies, and the industry’s own body says the capacity to deliver them exists. Yet small firms keep watching the big work slip past. The reason is almost never the standard of the cleaning. It is the gap between being able to do a contract and being ready to be given one – a gap that is decided long before anyone picks up a cloth.
The tension is real and public. When the National Pension Scheme Authority awarded a cleaning contract worth around K4 million to a foreign firm, the Cleaning Association of Zambia objected that this cut against the local-preference rules, and its president, Lawrence Makumbi, has repeatedly pressed institutions to keep such contracts with Zambian companies. The friction has at times turned bitter: Makumbi was arrested in May 2025 over public remarks about a disputed K22 million airport cleaning contract, a case in which Transparency International Zambia’s executive director, Maurice Nyambe, raised concern about his detention. Set the disputes aside and a plainer fact remains. Advocacy can open the door, but it cannot walk a firm through it. That part is on the firm.
What buyers actually ask for
A large contract is not awarded to the best cleaner in the room; it is awarded to the firm that best answers a procurement process. That process asks questions a small operator rarely keeps ready. Is the company registered and tax-compliant, with current statutory papers? Can it show it has run work at a comparable scale, with references a buyer can telephone? Does it have documented systems – how staff are vetted, how a site is supervised, how a complaint is handled, how quality is signed off? Institutional buyers, wary of the very disputes that reach the newspapers, increasingly want evidence rather than assurances. A firm that cleans brilliantly but cannot produce this file is judged not to exist, because in a tender what is not documented did not happen.
Track record is the hardest of these to conjure at the last minute, and it is where the smallest firms are squeezed. A buyer wants proof that you have delivered before, but you cannot deliver at scale until a buyer takes the first chance on you. The way out is not to wait for that chance; it is to build a record from the work you already do. Every domestic and small-commercial job is evidence if it is captured – a signed completion, a named client willing to be a reference, a note of the crew and the hours. Firms that treat small jobs as beneath recording arrive at their first real tender with nothing to show, while firms that document everything arrive with a portfolio.
Delivery capacity is the other quiet disqualifier. A contract to clean a mall or a set of regional offices is not a bigger version of a house; it needs crews that can be assembled, led and held to a standard across sites at once. A one-person business cannot credibly promise that, and buyers know it. They have seen firms win on price and then fail on the ground – toilets left uncleaned, an office locked out at dawn because no cleaner arrived – and they are slow to gamble again on a promise unbacked by evidence. Building the ability to scale a reliable crew up and down, without carrying a large payroll between contracts, is the operational problem that separates a firm that can bid from a firm that can only dream of bidding.
This is where the everyday tools a firm uses to staff its ordinary work start to matter for its contract ambitions. On Kleana, which operates in Zambia alongside South Africa, Zimbabwe and Botswana, cleaners are listed by skill, area and rate under a verification tier, and a “Kleana Verified” listing means a person has sighted the cleaner’s identity document and telephoned a former employer. For a firm assembling a crew against a defined business-cleaning scope, being introduced to already-checked cleaners – for a single introduction fee, with no cut taken from anyone’s wage – is a way to build contract-ready delivery capacity around a crew lead rather than gambling on unvetted labour when a big job finally lands. The vetting is part of the record a buyer later wants to see.
What all this changes for the reader is where the effort goes. The instinct, when large contracts feel out of reach, is to lobby harder for the rules to be enforced. That work has its place, and bodies such as the Cleaning Association exist to do it. But the firm that benefits when a contract finally opens is not the loudest complainant; it is the one that had its registration current, its references gathered, its systems written down and its crew already checked. Readiness is quiet, unglamorous and entirely within a small owner’s control.
The decisive move is to build contract readiness before there is a contract to chase – to treat every small job this month as a documented reference, to write down how the firm vets, supervises and signs off work, and to develop a way to assemble a checked crew on demand. When the reserved-sector rules do their job and a large tender opens to local firms, the door will already be open. The only question is whether you walked toward it while no one was watching, or waited until the day it mattered and found you had nothing to hand across the table.
Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa
