The Sunday News
Chrispen Gumunyu, Business Reporter
THE Standard Association of Zimbabwe (SAZ) will next month embark on an extensive training programme targeted at ensuring Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) improve the standards of their products for export markets.
SAZ director-certification service Mr Sebastian Zuze said as the country makes concerted efforts to generate the much needed foreign currency it was of paramount importance to enhance the competitiveness of goods produced by SMEs that are meant for the export market.
“We will be focusing on training SMEs to interpret standards. So we will be having the standards in the form of a document. We will be training them in local languages to ensure that it is more effective. This comes after the realisation that about 80 percent of our business is now in the informal sector and SMEs are at different levels of developments.
“The Minister of Industry and Commerce (Nqobizitha Ndlovu) has been very clear that we need to focus on ways to generate the much-needed forex which is why we need to operate in markets such as the European Union (EU) where for example our products such as honey can cost up to about three or four times compared to the one produced in those markets as ours is much organic,” he said.
Mr Zuze said the association would also roll out a maturity model aimed at measuring and enforcing quality standards within the SMEs sector as well big businesses.
“We have come up with a maturity model, which is a platform that will enable SAZ to reach out at SMEs and various businesses in different locations to ensure that they develop. So we will educate them on the standards they need to conform to, so that they can penetrate markets, which will give better returns,” he said.
Mr Zuze lamented that lack of adherence to standards was also affecting most of the country’s conglomerates’ export competitiveness.
“We also want to include big businesses so that they can reduce costs because some of our products are very expensive. So they need to make profit at factory level by increasing efficiency, which will reduce costs. To operate in international markets, we will need to satisfy expectations to do with hygiene levels,” he said.
Mr Zuze said the association intends to play a huge part in reviving the country’s industry especially that of Bulawayo, which has been on a free-fall largely due to economically related factors.
“In Bulawayo we are on a mission to play our part in the revival of industries. So we want to ensure that we engage the big players in the industry so that we update them about new developments in the world of standards and make sure that they become much more efficient, all with the aim that they can be viable and start exporting their products.
“We are happy with the effort that Bulawayo is making. We have the United Refineries and National Foods there who are using standards so we want to encourage SMEs and other businesses to do the same. We will be at the ZITF (Zimbabwe International Trade Fair) but training will begin on the first week of May and this time we want to customise the training and make sure that it is inclusive,” he said.
@chrispen_gee
