The Sunday News
Njabulo Bhebe, Business Reporter
THE Bulawayo Leather Cluster has challenged small-to-medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) in various sectors of the economy to come up with business clusters so as to enhance productivity and profitability of their entities.
In an interview with Sunday News Business during a tour of the Bulawayo Leather Cluster factory by the European Union ambassador to Zimbabwe Mr Timo Olkkonen recently, the organisation’s secretary-general Mr Fungai Zvinondiramba said clusters remained the most viable way to catapult the growth and expansion of SMEs.
“The cluster system is the easiest way in which SMEs can be empowered to really run formal businesses because in clusters we meet and we share ideas, skills and encourage each other to formalise our operations. This is why I urge that SMEs must embrace the cluster system to facilitate their growth.
“There is no reason for one to operate a backyard business, clusters have accorded us an opportunity to engage in a common place to work where we have to formalise. So, the cluster management itself is designed in a manner in which it also trains other members to formalise and run their business formally,” he said.
A business cluster is a geographic concentration of inter-connected businesses and associated institutions in a particular field. Clusters are considered to increase the productivity with which companies can compete nationally and globally. Mr Zvinondiramba said the Bulawayo Leather Cluster had managed to grab a substantial niche market locally and plans were already underway to explore the export market.
“We have a local market that has showed keen interest in our products with some buying most of our products for resale. The factory is producing about 450 pairs of shoes per day and we have been working on an order of about 450 pairs that is bound for Namibia in the few coming weeks,” he said
The cluster system involves housing business units that are in the same line of work under one roof and having them order materials communally. The leather cluster concept was introduced in Southern Africa by the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) secretary-general Mr Sindiso Ngwenya in 2011 to replicate the ones in Ethiopia with Bulawayo Leather Cluster being the first such institute in the country.
Bulawayo Leather Cluster’s factory started operations in 2018. The factory, whose workers underwent specialised training that was conducted by a shoe manufacturing expert brought in by Comesa, has a capacity to produce about 158 400 pairs of shoes annually.
