SECURICO, the company that Zimbabwe’s Divine Ndhlukula started in her cottage in the late 1990s with four employees and very little capital, has become one of her country’s largest security firms. According to her, perhaps the biggest barrier she had to face when she set it up was her gender.
“Obviously, as a woman, people would not believe that I could run a security company – particularly with no security background,” she told the BBC’s series African Dream. However, she held firmly to her purpose and Securico now employs more than 3,500 people, including nearly 900 women.
“We provide cutting-edge services. We move cash and valuables for companies and banks; we also provide electronic security systems – that’s the CCTVs, the access control systems, the alarms, the rapid responses, remote site monitoring and so on,” she said. “If things keep on going according to her plans, she hopes that within five years Securico will have branches in neighbouring countries and reach an annual profit of more than US$50 million.
The company has not only grown physically. It has also been recognised as one of the continent’s leaders in business excellence and in 2011 it beat 3,300 other firms and won the coveted $100,000 Grand Prize at the Africa Awards for Entrepreneurship in Nairobi, Kenya. The organisers said that Securico “exemplifies the vital role played by entrepreneurs in creating economic growth, prosperity, and realising opportunity in Africa” and pointed out that it is the largest employer of women in the private sector in Zimbabwe.
After beginning in farming, Ms. Ndhukla obtained a marketing diploma and switched to a career in marketing. Her dream finally came true in 1998 when she realised that there was a gap in the security services sector, an area that was dominated by male entrepreneurs. She noticed that the quality of the services many of the existing companies provided was not up to the standards of the big corporations and multinationals operating in Zimbabwe. That is how Securicor was born.
Ndhlukula remembers that she started with three security operatives and two managers, including herself. Because she did not need a lot of capital, she approached people who she knew and trusted – former schoolmates, ex-colleagues, friends and relatives – and asking them to support her new project.
“Slowly people began to gain confidence as they saw how serious I was, they saw how ambitious and how passionate and determined I was. I was so involved in the business. “They began to notice that ‘look, this business seems to be serious and their service seems to be even much better than those established companies’, so they started referring us,” she said.
(Woman who took on Security Men and Won, New Zimbabwe)