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Beitbridge Border Post

Lungelo Ndhlovu, Business Correspondent

THE Zimbabwe Cross Border Association (ZCBA) is working on establishing a facility to finance value addition of agricultural produce to enhance earnings from exports, an official said yesterday.

Zimbabwe and Southern Africa Cross Border Association secretary general Augustine Tawanda told Business Chronicle that cross border traders were generating a lot of income in the country, which could be improved if value addition was successfully implemented.

He said value addition would earn Zimbabwe more money and tame the sky rocketing imports, which he said were killing the economy.

“As cross border traders we understand our national obligation. We’ve always been more slanted towards export driven trade and we would bring back the rand and hard currencies home.

“When we dollarised the game changed. It is now import driven. People are moving out with United States dollars and buy products. As an organisation we want to promote value addition to our export products,” said Tawanda.

He said ZCBA was engaged in a programme of engaging different interested groups to establish a value edition fund, which is going to promote processed exports.

“We’ve identified partners and set up what we call a value addition fund. We’ve got financial wholesalers who are prepared to put funds to a local bank, which is a participation method and we’ll then send our members to go and access those funds in groups.

“This is not about collateral, it’s about group lending. But the focus as the name says, value addition, 60 percent of the funds will try and promote projects like mushroom farming because it doesn’t need a lot of space,” said Tawanda.

“A certain percentage will look at promoting exports, another percentage will look at imports, which feed into productive sectors. We want imports, which if somebody says they want to bring in raw materials, funding would be made available. This is where the value addition fund works and we’ve already developed this and we’re launching it in a couple of months.”

He said the fund will target traders and seek increased exports mainly from agro-related enterprises.