When most people picture the cleaning economy they picture labour: a woman with a cloth, an hourly rate, a household budget. That picture is true but partial. Behind every cloth is a bottle of detergent, and behind that bottle is a factory, a supply chain and a manufacturing sector that turns cleaning from a service you buy into a product Zambia can make. The mistake is to treat cleaning as labour alone. Its more valuable end is industrial, and Zambia already builds there.
The clearest evidence sits in Lusaka’s Multi Facility Economic Zone, where Trade Kings – the fast-moving consumer goods group that started in 1995 with fifty staff and now makes hundreds of products, among them the Boom detergent paste found in kitchens across the country – built a US$40 million detergent plant it billed as the largest powder-detergent manufacturing facility in Sub-Saharan Africa. That is not a side note to the cleaning story; it is the same story at a different point on the chain. Every household and every cleaning crew that scrubs a floor is a customer for what that plant makes, and the kwacha that change hands for a tub of paste stay in the country in a way an imported bottle’s never do.
From a service you buy to a product you make
The link between the two ends is worth spelling out, because it is where the value is. A cleaning service creates steady, predictable demand for consumables – detergents, disinfectants, bleaches, polishes, cloths and equipment – month after month. That demand is exactly what a domestic manufacturer needs to justify a plant: not a one-off order but a recurring national appetite. When that appetite is met by local factories rather than imports, three things happen at once. The value added in manufacturing stays in Zambia, jobs are created upstream of the cleaner, and the products themselves can get cheaper because they are not carrying the cost of a border crossing. Cleaning, seen whole, is a manufacturing demand signal as much as a labour market.
Import substitution is the quiet engine here. A litre of cleaning chemical made in Lusaka does not cross a border, does not carry freight and duty, and is not fully exposed to every swing in the kwacha against the currencies of the countries it would otherwise be shipped from. That is why a domestic plant can, over time, put a more affordable tub on the shelf than an importer; the economies of scale Trade Kings pointed to when it built the plant were meant to lower production costs and, with them, consumer prices. For a cleaning crew buying in bulk every month, the gap between locally made and imported consumables is not abstract. It is margin, and margin is what lets a small operator survive a lean season.
Where the policy weight is going
Government reads the sector this way too. Announcing investment figures in May 2026, Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry Chipoka Mulenga said Zambia had recorded some US$14 billion in investment in recent years and, with it, more than 190,000 jobs. The Zambia Development Agency has been blunter about where the weight sits: its director general, Albert Halwampa, reported that manufacturing led the country’s investment boom, accounting for US$7.33 billion of actualised investment – the largest share of any sector, at more than a third of the total. Detergents and household products are a real part of that manufacturing base, not a rounding error, and the special economic zones the government has built exist precisely to pull that kind of value-adding industry onshore.
Where the service layer meets the product layer
For anyone working in cleaning, the practical consequence is that the sector has more than one place to add value. There is the labour layer – the introduction, the verified worker, the household relationship. And there is the product layer – what she cleans with, where it is bought, and who made it. The two are increasingly joined rather than separate. Kleana, better known for introducing households to cleaners, also runs a shop that lists cleaning products and the suppliers behind them alongside its introductions, so that a single platform touches both the service and the goods it consumes. That linkage is modest in itself, but it points at the larger structure: a cleaning economy is a chain running from a factory in an economic zone, through a distributor and a supplier, to the cloth in a worker’s hand – and value can be captured at every link, not only the last one.
There is a distribution layer in between, and it is where a great deal of the everyday value actually sits. A factory in an economic zone does not sell directly to the woman scrubbing a floor in Kabwe or Kitwe; its products pass through wholesalers, retailers and the small traders who break bulk into the tubs and bottles a household can afford. Each of those hands adds a margin, and each is a business a Zambian entrepreneur can own. The cleaning crew that buys a drum of local disinfectant and resells it in litres to the households on its round is, without quite noticing, operating in that distribution layer rather than the labour one.
The decisive point is one of ambition. An entrepreneur who sees cleaning only as labour is competing for a share of an hourly rate. One who sees the whole chain has more room to move: into distributing detergents to the crews and households that need them, into supplying the disinfectants and equipment that offices reorder every month, or – as Trade Kings has shown at industrial scale – into making the products themselves. The country’s manufacturing numbers say the appetite and the policy support are already there. Cleaning is not only a job somebody does in your home. It is a supply chain with a factory at one end, and the higher-value stretches of that chain are the ones still open to whoever looks past the mop.
Source: Kleana Africa – kleana.africa
