Ireen Banda is my name a mother of 2 children. I hold a Zambian green national registration card. I'm an entrepreneur and I live in Barastone township in Lusaka.

I went to Muchinga primary school in Matero township and completed my form 5 at Matero Secondary School. During my school days, I was hard working and performing well in class. Coming from a humble background my desire was to complete school successfully and get a good job so that I could be helping my family and siblings.

Being the first born and girl child at the same it was not easy for me. Some times I could not go to school due to transport challenges as the school was far away from home and parents were just small income earners. My father was security guard and my mother was selling some merchandizers at the market to make end meat for us as children to have food at home. Hence I grew up in difficulty times and completing school was not easy due to difficulties in paying school fees.

Despite hard times both home and at school, I managed to complete school and obtained a school certificate with the hoping getting a job and start helping my family.

I started looking for a job and managed to a job offer as a shop keeper. Having worked for 6 months, I did prove hard working to boss and I was promoted as Supervisor among my workmates. Hence my salary income increased and opened the door for me to start night school at Evelyn Hone College in the school of Pharmacy.

Having completed my studies and eventually graduated, I saw opportunity of opening my own shop, as opening an own shop was my greatest dream.

I have a shop which I in own community. I ran a Pharmacy and I sell medical drugs and cosmetics in the shop and these are; cough syrups, pain killers, pregnancy test, HIV test, antibiotics, malaria drugs, TB tablets, cancer, fever, diahorriah, constipation and many more drugs when requirement.

These medical drugs are very useful for the people especially patients sufferings from such illness and the drugs prevents the people from dyeing. I choose this kind of business because it is line with my qualification and I also the passion of taking care of the people and prescribe good drugs according the patients illness and directed by the physicians or the doctor from the local clinic.

I started this business with a little capital of ZMW 6000.00 and today my capital has grown to ZMW 14,000.00 hence I need the funds to support me in this project to build a big pharmacy shop and stock more drugs in our community due to high demand of drugs from the patients in our community.

Looking at the high demand of drugs in our community, I need to the funds to help me build a big pharmacy for the people of our community to have access to medicals drugs. Currently I'm renting a small shop, where I sell these drugs at the moment. Now that I want this project to grow, I bought a piece of land where I want to build a community pharmacy for the people to easily all the drugs than going to far distant places.