Small businesses in Colombia They currently generate much of the country’s economic momentum, while intermediate cities have become the main source of new business growth, according to the analysis by economist Eduardo Freire of the National Urban Economic Census (CENU) 2024.
The national census found that registered commercial establishments in Colombia doubled from one million in 1990 to more than two million in 2024, but the greatest transformation occurred outside Bogotá, Medellín and Cali, where the proportion of commercial establishments increased from approximately 60% to 69%.
Cities such as Bucaramanga, Pereira, Santa Marta, Ibagué, Popayán and Villavicencio have attracted much of this expansion thanks to lower operating costs, better connectivity and growing industries including tourism, healthcare and agribusiness.
Small businesses and neighborhood stores boost Colombia’s economy
Behind these aggregate figures hides a very specific type of business that does most of the heavy lifting, as the census confirms that commerce remains the most important economic activity in all sizes of cities in Colombia, and within that category, neighborhood stores, known locally as neighborhood storesThey function as true economic columns and not as small secondary companies.
Colombia has more than 260,000 of these small stores throughout the country, and Fenalco, the national federation of retailers, reports that they handle more than 60% of Colombians’ food purchases in general, a figure that rises to 96% specifically among low- and middle-income people. households of strata 1, 2 and 3.
Small supermarkets, hair salons, barber shops, auto repair shops, bakeries, and neighborhood pharmacies complete this same everyday commercial layer, as these are precisely the type of businesses that do not require heavy industrial infrastructure to open and operate, making them the natural engine of growth in cities that never built the manufacturing base that Bogotá or Medellín did.
Census data supports this pattern structurally as well, showing that industrial units shrank from 9.5% to 5.2% of Colombia’s total business population between 1990 and 2024, while service-oriented activities, from retail to personal care and small-scale food services, steadily expanded to fill that gap.
Why Colombia’s small businesses face growing challenges
Even as these small businesses anchor Colombia’s new economic geography, they face genuine tension that threatens to undermine their own momentum, as a Fenaltiendas report found that thousands of store owners are seeing their profit margins shrink under the pressure of the expansion of deep discount chains, growing insecurity, weakening household purchasing power, and the difficulty of modernizing operations to keep pace with larger competitors.
Fenalco has gone so far as to describe the majority of neighborhood stores as currently operating in “survival mode,” a stark assessment that highlights the gap between how essential these businesses remain to daily commerce and how financially fragile many of them actually are heading into the second half of 2026.
That tension is crucial for the entire country, not just individual store owners, as Freire’s analysis argues that the Colombian government should develop policies specifically around this issue. new economic mapone in which corner stores, hairdressers and small local service businesses in intermediate cities have real economic weight, rather than continuing to design the national strategy mainly around what happens in the three largest capitals.