9-Year-Old Zimmie Boyce Is Building a Candle Business Before She Finishes Grade Four

• Zymena “Zimmie” Boyce runs Zimmie Candle Studio
• She’s a soon-to-be grade five student at Jessie Ripoll Primary
• Her business operates while most classmates are still playing
• The venture points to Jamaica’s growing youth entrepreneurship push

At an age when most children are occupied with games and television, nine-year-old Zymena Zimmie Boyce is building a real business, running Zimmie Candle Studio while still a soon-to-be grade five student at Jessie Ripoll Primary School in Kingston.

Zimmie’s venture sits inside a broader, deliberate push in Jamaican education and youth policy to cultivate entrepreneurship well before secondary school, a shift from treating business skills as something taught later in life toward encouraging children to actually run something of their own while they’re still in primary school, learning production, pricing and customer relationships directly rather than only in the abstract.

The practical scale of a nine-year-old’s candle business is necessarily modest, but the underlying skills, sourcing materials, managing a small production process, presenting a product to customers, are the same fundamentals any larger Jamaican small business eventually needs, just compressed into a child’s after-school hours rather than a full-time commercial operation. For a country where small and medium enterprises make up a substantial share of economic activity, a nine-year-old already comfortable calling her candle-making an actual studio, rather than a hobby, represents the kind of early foundation youth entrepreneurship programmes are specifically designed to encourage.

Whether Zimmie’s studio grows alongside her through secondary school and beyond, or simply remains a formative early experience, its real significance sits less in candle sales than in what it demonstrates is now possible for a Jamaican child this young: a functioning small business, with a name, a product and real customers, built entirely outside the classroom.

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