The sharp suit-wearing, Toyota Corolla-driving, cellphone-owning epitome of Zambia’s growing middle class is now being bombarded with offers of salary-backed personal loans, mortgages and leasing deals. A few years ago he would not have got through the door, but now banks are falling over themselves to attract his business; there are win-a-car promotional draws at the shopping malls, and bank billboards almost outnumber the cellphone hoardings enveloping Lusaka’s streets.
It is a far cry from the ‘gin and tonic’ banking of five years ago, when all bankers had to do was take cheap deposits and buy treasury bills, with an occasional spot of foreign exchange trading on the side. Yet behind the billboards, often literally, Zambia’s unbanked – the 10 million poverty-stricken subsistence farmers in the rural areas and their struggling urban counterparts – have seen little change, battling with a familiar cycle of floods, drought, disease and hardship.