When Competition Becomes a Barrier to Growth
Part Two (2)
The Psychology of “I Must Be on Top”
At the heart of The Gambia’s collaboration problem is a particular psychological pattern that deserves to be named directly: the belief that success is only meaningful if it is exclusive. That building something together is a lesser achievement than building something alone. That sharing credit is the same as surrendering it.
This belief has cultural roots. In many Gambian communities, individual status, measured by visible wealth, by title, by the perception of being self-made, carries enormous social weight. The man who built his house alone is more admired than the man who built a larger house with a partner. The entrepreneur who can say “this is entirely mine” commands more respect than one who says “we built this together.” The incentive structure of social esteem points consistently toward individual achievement and away from shared endeavour.
This is reinforced by a deep seated distrust that runs through many collaborative arrangements. When Gambians are asked why they did not pursue a partnership opportunity, the answers often return to the same core fears: What if my partner cheats me? What if they take credit for my work? What if they see how my business operates and then use that knowledge to compete against me? What if I end up doing all the work while they collect half the reward?
These are not irrational fears. They arise from real experiences of partnerships that ended badly, of money that went missing, of promises that were not kept. Trust, once broken, is slow to rebuild. And in a society where formal legal systems for enforcing contracts and resolving commercial disputes are weak, the risk of collaboration can feel very high and the protection against betrayal very low.
But there is an important distinction between healthy caution and paralysing distrust. Healthy caution leads to careful vetting of partners, clear written agreements, transparent financial systems, and strong governance structures. Paralysing distrust leads to the rejection of all collaboration, the retreat into isolation, and the permanent smallness that follows. Many Gambian entrepreneurs, burned or fearing to be burned, have settled for the safety of permanent smallness rather than taking the managed risk of building with others.
The fear of being cheated by a partner has kept more Gambians poor than any partner ever could have.
There is also the question of ego, which should be discussed honestly even if it is uncomfortable. The reluctance to share leadership, to accept a role that is not “the top” role, to allow another person equal standing in something you have built, is a significant obstacle to partnership in The Gambia. Many business collaborations have collapsed not because of financial disagreement or incompetence but because two people could not agree on who was more important. The need to be seen as the one in charge has ended partnerships that could have been genuinely transformative.
This ego-driven competition is particularly damaging because it masquerades as principled disagreement. Entrepreneurs will cite strategic differences or management disputes when the real issue is simpler and harder to admit: neither person was willing to be second.
The Hidden Cost to Communities and the Nation
The effects of this competitive, fragmented culture extend far beyond individual businesses. They ripple outward into communities, into the labour market, and into the long-term development trajectory of the country.
Consider the impact on employment. A country with many micro-enterprises, each employing one or two people, creates fewer stable, well-paying jobs than a country with a smaller number of larger, better-capitalised enterprises. The street vendor who operates alone may employ nobody. The poultry farmer with a hundred birds hires no staff. But the consolidated poultry operation with ten thousand birds employs processors, drivers, feed suppliers, and salespeople. The transition from fragmented smallness to organised scale is not merely a business achievement, it is a job creation strategy.
The tax base is also affected. Small informal enterprises that operate below the threshold of formal registration contribute little to public revenue. As businesses scale and formalise, tax revenue grows — and with it, the government’s capacity to invest in infrastructure, education, and health. A country of ten thousand micro-enterprises is harder to tax efficiently than a country of five hundred medium enterprises. The fiscal implications of business fragmentation are real and significant.
There is a broader innovation deficit as well. Large, well-resourced companies invest in research, in staff training, in new equipment, and in better processes. Small, capital-constrained enterprises operating day to day in survival mode rarely have the bandwidth or the resources to innovate. The absence of a strong medium-enterprise sector in The Gambia is one reason why productivity growth across the economy has been slow. You cannot innovate your way to prosperity one person at a time.
Finally, fragmentation weakens the political economy of business. Large enterprises and organised industry associations have the voice and the leverage to engage with government on policy, to advocate for better infrastructure, to negotiate for regulatory improvements. Thousands of atomised micro-enterprises, each speaking only for themselves, have almost no collective influence. The business community’s ability to shape the environment it operates in is directly related to its degree of organisation, and organisation requires the collaboration that competition has been undermining.
What Must Change: A Practical Path Forward
Identifying the problem is the easier task. The harder and more important question is what can realistically be done about it. The following observations are offered not as a comprehensive policy blueprint but as a starting point for a conversation that is long overdue.
First, schools must deliberately teach collaboration as a skill. This means more than team projects and group assignments, though those are a start. It means restructuring how achievement is recognised, rewarding teams as well as individuals, celebrating students who lift others rather than only those who outperform them. It means teaching the history and logic of collective action in business and economics curricula. And it means training teachers to model collaborative behaviour, since children learn at least as much from how adults work together as from what they are formally taught.
Second, the legal and financial infrastructure that makes collaboration safer must be strengthened. One reason distrust is so prevalent is that the cost of being betrayed is so high and the recourse so limited. Streamlined, accessible commercial dispute resolution whether through reformed courts, mediation centres, or sector-specific arbitration would change the risk calculus of partnership. When the consequences of betrayal are clear and enforceable, people are less afraid to collaborate because the exit is known and protected. Similarly, cooperative banking products and joint-venture financing mechanisms tailored to small and medium enterprises would remove the capital barrier that currently prevents consolidation.
Third, successful collaborative enterprises need to be deliberately publicised and celebrated. The Gambia has examples of businesses and community organisations that have built something meaningful together. These stories are rarely told at the national level. A sustained public campaign through radio, community forums, schools, and social media, that documents and promotes the stories of Gambians who built more by building together would begin to shift the cultural weight of the issue. Role models and narratives matter enormously in shaping what people believe is possible and desirable.
Fourth, business associations and sector groups must take on the active role of facilitating consolidation conversations among their members. Rather than simply lobbying government or organising networking events, industry bodies could create structured processes for identifying complementary businesses, mediating partnership discussions, and providing governance templates for joint ventures. This is not a new idea, it is how business associations have historically accelerated sectoral development in many countries. The Gambia’s associations have largely not yet embraced this function.
Fifth, and perhaps most fundamentally, Gambians must begin an honest cultural conversation about the meaning of success. As long as the social definition of achievement is tied primarily to individual, visible, personal accumulation, the incentives will continue to push toward competition and away from collaboration. A richer, more honest definition of success, one that includes legacy, community contribution, institutional building, and collective prosperity, would create space for a different kind of ambition.
The most patriotic thing a Gambian entrepreneur can do right now may be to share what they know, and build what they cannot build alone.
The Choice Between Smallness and Scale
The Gambia stands at a crossroads that many developing nations have faced before it. One path leads toward an economy of perpetual fragmentation, thousands of small actors competing ferociously over a limited pie, each too constrained to grow and too suspicious to combine. The other path leads toward an economy of deliberate consolidation, businesses that choose to build together, cooperatives that create the scale individual farmers cannot, professionals who share knowledge rather than hoard it, and entrepreneurs who understand that a smaller share of something large is worth more than the whole of something small.
The resources, the talent, and the ambition are present in The Gambia. This is not a country that lacks capable people. What it sometimes lacks is the institutional trust, the cultural permission, and the practical frameworks that would allow capable people to multiply each other’s strength rather than cancel it out.
Competition, properly channelled, remains a valuable force. The goal is not to eliminate the drive to excel but to redirect it, away from zero sum rivalry and toward the kind of competitive excellence that comes from building something large enough to matter, efficient enough to dominate, and ambitious enough to reach beyond The Gambia’s borders.
The world does not reward individual effort alone. It rewards organised capability, teams, institutions, cooperatives, consortiums, and companies that have figured out how to combine strengths toward a shared goal. This is as true in Banjul as it is in developed countries, as relevant to a groundnut cooperative in the North Bank as it is to a technology startup in New Delhi.
Success does not always mean being ahead of everyone. Sometimes often, it means deciding to move forward together.
That choice is available. The question is whether enough Gambians will make it.