The Sunday News
Judith Phiri, Business Reporter
CONTINUED engagement and collaboration efforts between Government and the private sector are set to ensure economic stability and growth while being a key enabler in attaining Vision 2030 of achieving an upper middle-income economy.
One of the key strategies the two are meant to implement is to drive up industrial value chains which will result in increased domestic manufacturing output.
Minister of Industry and Commerce Dr Sekai Nzenza said the Government, working together with the private sector, has launched a number of strategies to develop and strengthen key industrial value chains.
“Together with the private sector we have developed a number of strategies that fall within the framework of the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1).
Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) president, Mr Kurai Matsheza
These will result in capacity utilisation jump, which confirms the country’s manufacturing sector is on a rebound mode, and is responding positively to the Second Republic’s economic reform agenda.”
She was addressing delegates at the Ministry of Industry and Commerce in collaboration with Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) Exhibitors Business-to-Business (B2B) Networking Dinner which was held on the sidelines of the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) last week. It ran under the theme: “Retool and innovate for the development of value chains.”
The Minster said business-led initiatives such as research and development partnerships, knowledge-sharing platforms, technology and skills transfer, and infrastructure investment had the potential to kick-start development, enable productivity gains, generate better quality jobs, strengthen skills and promote technological advances.
“We need to locally transform our commodities and reduce the amount of exports that we are doing.
We are exporting our raw materials as they are, we now need to manufacture locally and create jobs and bring in technology and new equipment,” she said.
She said a number of strategies have been launched such as the Pharmaceutical Manufacturing Strategy, with an aim to improve the local production of drugs.
She added that Zimbabwe was only making 12 percent of the medicines consumed in the country, yet the country had the capacity to innovate and produce its own brands of medicines.
Dr Nzenza said for the Zimbabwe Leather Sector Strategy launched last year, she was pleased that some changes were taking place.
Photo Credit: Shutterstock
“Already we are beginning to see changes where we are reducing the amount of raw hides that are going straight to Europe as they are and already we are beginning to get support from Comesa.
When you go on a tour of some ZITF stands you will be able to see some of the most amazing shoes that are being made in this country from giraffe skin, elephants, crocodiles even from rhinos and let alone our cattle.”
She said young people were making the most amazing leather products.
For sectors such as cotton clothing, Government had developed a strategy that will see more cotton being grown locally together with other products such as sunflower and soya beans for crude soya bean oil.
“We will be working closely with the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water, Climate and Rural Development collaboratively and this is what President Mnangagwa has been talking about the whole Government approach, the working together of various Government Ministries and departments,” added Dr Nzenza.
She said as Government they had also created closer linkages and collaboration with CZI, ZNCC and other private sector players that will see private sector led growth.
“ZITF is giving us a platform of increasing and strengthening our collaboration so that we make it more meaningful to implement a private sector led growth,” said Dr Nzenza.
CZI president, Mr Kurai Matsheza called for a quick shift of focus towards upscaling local products value addition.
He said local industries should produce goods that dominate the local market in order to guard against global shocks.
“When you look at the six contributors to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP); agriculture, mining, manufacturing, wholesale, information, finance and insurance, the biggest is the wholesale sector,” he said.
