small.world Features told through the lens of Silver Lining’s global partners that explore the small business landscape, sharing powerful stories, policies, and innovations from across countries and cultures. Do you know someone who should be writing a small.world feature? Nominate them today! From a Mother’s Recipe to Myanmar’s Modern Trade: How Royal Manizawta Reinvented a Family Balm for a New Generation In 2007, a mother in Yangon received a formulation from a traditional medicine doctor in Taiwan—not as a business plan, but as a remedy for her own daughters, who suffered from skin rashes and allergic reactions to conventional analgesic rubs.Read More → What South Africa’s Small Businesses Understand About Money that the Rest of Us Are Still Learning A manufacturing business owner in Gauteng once explained her business to us in a way no financial statement could. Her company supplied specialized components to larger industrial clients and had a healthy order book most of the year, but every month brought the same knot in her stomach.Read More → Resilience by Necessity: What South African Small Businesses Can Teach the World It’s 5:00 AM on a chilly South African morning. As coffee machines hum to life and learners and students prepare for school, before the first rays of the Highveld sun strike the roofs of buildings, there is a sweet, heavy scent of hot magwinya (vetkoek) hitting deep oil.Read More → A Small Corner of Goa, A Window to the World’s Small Businesses People often ask me what it’s like to live in Goa. I usually smile because the answer depends on what time of day you ask me. Before nine in the morning, it’s exactly what you’d imagine. The air is still. The coconut trees barely move. A scooter hums past my house, someone nearby is already…Read More → Small Businesses are the Silent Engine of Asia Before most cities wake up, millions of small business owners across Pakistan, Bangladesh, Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, India, and Nepal are already at work.Read More → She Didn’t Want My Plan, She Wanted Her Mother At a fashion show I produced called Legacy Walk, I paired a young mentee with a mentor I believed was the right fit for her — someone whose interests and experience aligned with where I thought her path should go.Read More → Silver Lining Launched silv=rAI™ to be More Deeply Human, Small Business First Many AI tools that are “built for small business” are actually designed to replace the owner. Or replace staff. At Silver Lining, we built ours to protect the human in the loop.Read More → Do 90% of Startups Fail? Maybe, but That’s Not the Real Story When people mention that 90% of startups fail, they often do so with dramatic certainty. It can sound like a warning label on entrepreneurship: dangerous, irrational, even foolish.Read More → Running a Business Through War: A CEO’s Story from Ukraine Everyone lives their own story. Mine took a sharp turn in February 2022. I was the CEO of one of Ukraine’s largest convenience store chains when, overnight, war redefined my role and purpose. For two years, I managed that business through wartime. I was part of the Food Safety Committee working directly with the Office…Read More → The Missing Middle: Why MENA’s Small Businesses Don’t Need More Capital — They Need Structure Across MENA, small and medium-sized enterprises make up 80 to 90 % of all businesses—about 19 to 23 million operations. In some markets, they contribute up to 70% of GDP and about half of all employment. SMEs are not peripheral to the region’s economy. They are the economy.Read More → The Quiet Backbone: What Small Businesses in Kenya Teach Us About Resilience, Building Trust and Community As I sat and reminisced about the african smb ecosystem, I thought about what it takes for us to really change the game and help SMBs succeed. Currently, there is a lot of focus on Africa, especially given its innovative and youthful population. The next few years offer many opportunities for SMB growth, and with…Read More → The Issue in Latin America isn’t A Lack of Capital—It’s The Ineffective Delivery of Technical Assistance SMBs are the backbone of the economy. When I say SMBs, I mean small and medium-sized businesses. These are the corner store, the small manufacturer, the family-run service company, or the growing 10-person team trying to stabilize revenue.Read More → The Geography of Opportunity: Why the Next Member of Your Team is in Africa For generations, small businesses have thrived on invisible networks: the right handshake, the right alma mater, the right family connection to open doors.Read More → Why Small Businesses Often Understand Wealth Better Than Billionaires If you run a small business, you might not see yourself as wealthy, at least not in the way most people use the word.Read More → Small Businesses Build the Global Economy, So Why Are They Left Out of It? In economies where the gap between promises and reality is often the largest, small businesses still create 45% of jobs and serve as the primary engine of growing local communities. This isn’t a niche sector, but the economy.Read More → 1 2 3 Next Page