The Sunday News
Judith Phiri, Business Reporter
GOKWE South Rural District Council (RDC) has partnered up with a local organisation, Agricultural Business Centre (ABC) to equip farmers, women and youths with entrepreneurial skills, in a bid to improve the livelihoods of rural communities.
In an interview, the RDC’s acting chief executive officer Ms Dorothy Makoni said they have developed projects meant to boast revenue streams of the people.
“As the RDC works on enhancing grassroots development, we are working with ABC to boast revenue streams of the people through various projects targeted at farmers, women and the youths.
“Some of the projects are looking at how to manage agribusiness and how to engage into entrepreneurial activities such as horticulture and selling of cellphones among others. We are also offering youths and women land where they can develop agricultural, poultry or cattle and goats rearing projects,” said Ms Makoni.
She said the RDC was offering land at good rates with flexible payment terms, allowing people to fully develop communities and projects.
Ms Makoni said after conducting youth trainings on how to start and manage a business, raising capital and record keeping, they were offering the trainees with proof of residence free of charge so that they can be able to open bank accounts and register their startups.
She added: “We have started construction of a flea market at Nemangwe Cotton Marketing Board shopping centre called Sesame business centre where people will come and sell produce and products from the various projects, they are partaking in. This is a development that will see buyers getting fresh produce and wide variety of products to choose from.”
Ms Makoni said that ABC was working with farmers to develop key value chains for bambara nuts, sunflower, chillies and small grains.
She noted that farmers have been grouped into commodity associations and have formed a farmers’ cooperative, with ABC assisting them with market linkages nationally and regionally.
Ms Makoni noted: “The organisation is also working on developing international export readiness for produce like chilies. Soon most of the farmers’ produce will be exported to other countries once they have satisfied the local markets.”
Besides training the local communities, she said ABC also provided training for the RDC.
“We were trained on council management, taken to council exchange visits to other RDCs such as Gwanda and Chivi to look and learn on how they are thriving. Councillors were also trained on how to develop organize nutrition gardens so that families have balanced diets and they can then sell the extras.”
She said other trainings centred on improved household setups, sanitation and waste management at homes among others.
ABC local economic development officer Mrs Martha Nyabadza said that before they could implement some of the projects, a business index survey was carried out to better understand the business environment in the district.
She said that in line with key pillars of ease of doing business, one of their findings was lack of access to information, mainly by youths as some had no clue what the RDC does and who their councillors were.
Mrs Nyabadza said: “As we kick started the projects, we wanted to make sure we provide the youths with as much information as possible about their district. We then assisted the RDC to come up with a district SWOT analysis and a five-year strategic plan on easy of doing business in the district.”
She said that they were helping them implement the key tenants of the strategy through corporate entrepreneurship programmes for revenue generation of the council.
Mrs Nyabadza said they were assisting the council develop policies which will later become by-laws that will create enabling environments for business, youth and entrepreneurs.
ABC is a sustainable social enterprise which was established by Welthungerhilfe and Empretec Zimbabwe with funding from European Union.
It aims to carry out commercial activities that increase farmers’, young women and men’s income working together with other local structures, thereby creating an enabling environment for business and youth entrepreneurship.
