The Sunday News
Francis Mupazviriho
THIS time around last year, I wrote about the emerging global trends regarding employment, including casualisation of labour. A number of contributors had been engaged by the paper for write-ups, some including from Trade Unions and human resources professionals. I touched on the prevailing international dimension of labour, thus intentionally departing from the local structures.
That piece also delved much on the creative industries whose exponential value to youth employment is now a reality world over, including in the developing world, where youths are now coming up with start-ups and other innovations seeking to solve common daily problems by harnessing the power of smart technology.
The argument was that technology had strongly affected the world of work to unprecedented levels. A revisit of these issues is warranted, albeit on another day. Today, I will go back to the drawing board once again, this time having to focus on Zimbabwe’s diaspora which is redefining itself and seeing the need to invest back at home across different sectors.
The Zimbabwean diaspora is investing home in varying capacities, just as is occurring across the continent, whether formally or informally. Some success stories have been scored of reasonably big entities which have relied on external capital inflows to start shop. These have however, remained few. What is common are externally funded business entities which have been largely organised on family lines often failing to live beyond the biological life of the owner.
While the rationale for any business out there is to make profit and to sustain itself, most of such investments have faced difficulties in weaning themselves from continuing dependency. Whichever case however, the determination of our people abroad, now wanting to utilise their coping experiences back at home.
While mainstream media understandably locates the Zimbabwean diaspora as a creature of the new millennia’s movements ostensibly to South Africa and principally the United Kingdom and other Western capitals, there is however, a tangible historical background of temporary and permanent contacts within the region and to far flung places.
This period has notably been described as a brain drain especially affecting nurses, teachers, doctors, engineers and as well as across the blue collar sectors. Despite the varied professional orientations, these individuals are constantly adapting to the need to set up shop back at home.
In the metropolitan spirit, you now find Zimbabweans in Beijing, Bangkok, Amsterdam, Dubai and many other such places which were not popular bases. But things have changed. In the process Zimbabwe’s population outside its borders is now large.
A glimpse of this constituency was evident during the engagements which President Emmerson Mnangagwa held with Zimbabweans abroad, during the side-lines of bilateral and multi-lateral trips. The biggest such engagement was in South Africa, where the venue was full to the bream. This format of engagement further continued across the capitals of the Southern African Development Community and of course in Addis Ababa which towers itself with all manner of regional and international organisations.
Beyond the continent, there were other interactions with Zimbabweans in New York, during the course of General Assembly and Doha among many other places. Apart from being keen to know about the political developments back home, this constituency often asked about the investment opportunities back at home.
This was one such fundamental question inherently juxtaposing the shifting roles, or rather the currency of the diaspora constituency, which now wants to play a key role back home.
They no longer want to wait for the traditional investors alone. They believe they can do it, in their quest to build the nation from their dormitories abroad. It is important that this key demographic group is constituted of some who left the country as unassuming youths in search for opportunities. Others left as formal sector employees, whether from the private or public sector.
From remitters to investors
World over, any mention of the diaspora is often synonymous with remittances. The impact of remittances has been felt in Zimbabwe especially since 2000, the time which brought the shift of social, economic and political conditions of the country.
Those in the diaspora, became key sources of sending remittance back at home, in an environment in which the Zimbabwean dollar was losing value.
