Andrew
Trade Focus
Allan Majuru
AS the country ramps up its efforts to grow exports, the role of centres of excellence as hubs for innovation, capacity building and quality control cannot be over-emphasised.
This is because the pace of learning and innovation in a country is critical to economic success, and centres of excellence provide opportunities for sector players and other interested parties to benefit from targeted and practical interventions on export-related issues.
From a quality perspective, the country needs a steady supply of skills to boost productivity and quality, which will be instrumental in sustaining growth of exports.
Currently, as in many countries and sectors, there is a gap in specialist skills and this is undermining the production of quality and competitive products.
To cover this skills gap, there is a need to establish centres of excellence that can help drive rapid and targeted improvements in the quality of training.
Centres of excellence in general are institutions that provide a high concentration of skills as well as resource-specific expertise.
They are a shared facility or entity that provides leadership, best practices, research, support, and training for a specific sector.
A centre of excellence houses, as a centralised unit, dedicated people with a mission to streamline access to scarce, high-demand capabilities for rapid execution across businesses.
For Zimbabwe, there is an opportunity for these centres to provide training on specific trade, and other micro and macro economy issues, which will enhance how businesses produce for export markets.
What is perhaps important is to establish why centres of excellence are important to the current thrust of growing exports.
Improve standards and boost productivity
Centres of excellence enable economies to grow following value chain or market system interventions.
This is because they equip sector players with internationally recognised standard requirements that make it easy to facilitate global movement.
Standards and certifications are a key component of export competitiveness and without them, Zimbabwean companies have limited or no access to the lucrative global markets.
They are an integral instrument that can contribute to the growth of exports for local businesses as international standards play a crucial part in reducing technical barriers to trade, reducing production costs, and offering opportunities for economies of scale on the international trade arena.
When operating under a centre of excellence, sector players are encouraged to follow and adopt specific standards that are widely recognised, making it easy for products to compete in international markets.
Further to this, as centres of excellence make use of technical specialists, businesses normally find it easy to access the relevant information and skills that make their products top quality.
Thus, standardisation is an integral instrument that can contribute to Zimbabwe’s economic growth and prosperity through the development of sustainable exports.
Additionally, the implementation of, and certification to international standards, by Zimbabwean companies, are an indication of quality to global customers, thus boosting the export potential and image of the nation. The issue of national brand building is critical and can be achieved through up-scaling of quality standards and the development of centres of excellence.
Stimulating innovation and developing clusters
Within centres of excellence, there is room to improve innovation and applied learning through research and development.
This is because the centres of excellence are most known for continuous improvement of production processes, through adopting new techniques.
They often attract the best research and development skills, and investment into the sector, making it easy for them to champion new products or production processes that improve quality and supply.
The centres also encourage adoption of production efficiencies, which reduce cost of doing business by, for example, cutting on electricity usage or adopting renewable energy solutions to production.
Thus, establishing centres of excellence across the country will help businesses, particularly small businesses, to adopt innovative approaches targeting at increasing production at low cost.
This will make it easy for the country to grow its exports.
Further to this, in line with the ongoing national devolution exercise, centres of excellence will make it easy to establish clusters, whose objective will be improving production and exports of specific products or resources.
Already, the Industrial Development Policy acknowledges that the centres of excellence are a key component of provincial cluster development in which the range of export development services can be offered at provincial level to nurture identified enterprises into export-ready entities.
Thus, establishing centres of excellence will make it easy for districts to unlock value that is in the natural resources they are endowed with, which in turn will improve their contribution to the national economy.
Current efforts to establish Centres of Excellence
There are ongoing processes to establish such centres across sectors, which will see improved products and services in the near future.
For example, ZimTrade — the national trade development and promotion agency — is in the process of establishing centres of excellence for the clothing, and arts and crafts sectors in provinces across the country. This is being undertaken in the context of the Government’s devolution agenda that is targeting to increase the contribution of all districts and provinces to the national economy.
These centres are being developed around areas and resources that provinces already enjoy competitive and comparative advantage.
The major objective of the centres being established by ZimTrade, together with its domestic and foreign partners, is to allow stakeholders to share training seminars to provide opportunities for participants to share their experiences and good practices.
Allan Majuru is ZimTrade chief executive
Online Reporter