The Sunday News
Judith Phiri, Business Reporter
THE Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe is set to receive more than US$600 000 from the African Development Bank in the next three years meant to help in the training of marginalised groups’ Small to Medium Enterprises.
This comes after AfDB approved PRAZ’s concept paper and agreed to work with them to support marginalised groups businesses.
PRAZ will receive a provisional allocation of about US$600 000 for the next three years from the AfDB which will be gradually increased based on the outcomes of the trainings.
In an interview, PRAZ chief executive officer Mr Clever Ruswa said they submitted a concept paper as they were resource mobilising for the trainings.
“We put up a concept paper to the AfDB when we were trying to resource mobilise to say from where we sit, we want to reach out to the marginalised groups but we may not have the budgetary support in terms of capex where we want to buy the computers and all.
“They (AfDB) agreed to work with us so that we can train the marginalised communities that include women owned businesses, the women in the communities, the youths and even war veterans.
“Then they gave us a budget and also pledged to make budget provisions, right now there is a provisional allocation of about US$600 000 for the next three years,” said Mr Ruswa.
He said AfDB agreed to provisionally increase the amount as at and when they are seeing them accomplishing set targets from the trainings.
Mr Ruswa said working together with the Ministry of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development and other key players they have begun trainings of marginalised groups.
“We are working with the Ministry of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development starting this month they will be in Zvishavane, Gokwe, Mutare, Mutasa among other areas.
‘We are just now trying to make sure that we don’t run parallel processes but we complement each other with the Ministry and all the other players with similar training programmes, so that we then fuse our programmes and timetables,” he added.
He said as a regulatory authority their goal was to complement all other Government departments and there was no need to compete with them for the same community.
Mr Ruswa said as PRAZ they were taking the lead in showing complementarities in Government efforts.
He added: “We must support Government policies and vision step by step to say where do we come in as a regulator.
“We must be an enabler not a bottleneck to the whole thing. Budgetary wise procurement is the biggest spender through public procurement and we want our locals to benefit instead of taking all the money to other countries.”
