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Dumisani Nsingo, Senior Business Reporter 

GOVERNMENT will soon establish Small to Medium Enterprises (SMEs) incubation centres throughout the country to accelerate development of startups and fledging entrepreneurs to effectively impact on growth of the  economy.

Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprise Development Minister, Dr Sithembiso Nyoni, said Government was in the process of engaging Indian institutions to assist in rolling out incubation centres in all the provinces.

The Minister attended the recent 6th India International Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) Expo and Summit where she was accompanied by Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Minister, Professor Amon Murwira.

“We met officials of companies and organisations, which we think will assist us to roll out incubation centres throughout the country. The idea behind the meetings was to learn how they are doing it and see how we can implement the initiative with the assistance of our technical institutions particularly looking at ways of improving productivity of these incubation centres,” said Dr Nyoni.

President Mnangagwa launched the country’s first India-Africa incubation centre in Harare in February this year.

“We set-up our first incubation centre in Harare with the help of the Indian Government and it was launched by the President in February but now we are working on rolling out the concept to other provinces.”

The incubation centre in Harare, which specialises in equipping young people with entrepreneurial skills to start own businesses, dovetails with President Mnangagwa’s vision of transforming the economy into an upper middle income economy by 2030. The centre is equipped with 25 different technologies in food processing, engineering, brick making and paper processing. It has capacity to accommodate 50 trainees per intake. Dr Nyoni said the incubation centres would be set up to suit production of resources in a given province. 

“We want incubators to be relevant to each province’s resource base because it won’t be ideal for us to set-up an incubation centre, which majors in food processing particularly juice production in an area like Masvingo where there aren’t many fruits or setting up small grains production and packaging in areas where small grains are not grown. So, we have to set up these incubation centres taking into consideration comparative advantages of certain area and according to the resource base and activities of SMEs in those particular areas,” she said.

Dr Nyoni said the summit also gave them an opportunity to exchange ideas with other countries on how best to develop the country’s economy through SMEs. 

“We will have a number of workshops on SMEs especially targeting the productive sector but on the sidelines we will also have meetings with companies manufacturing equipment and machinery tailor made for SMEs,” she said. — @DNsingo