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THE Government has gone a gear up in monitoring and implementation of Zim-Asset projects so that most of them meet their set target by 2018. Zim-Asset is a five-year plan (2013-2018) formulated by the Government in pursuit of a new trajectory of accelerated economic growth and wealth creation. In an effort to ensure progress of some the projects, the Office of the President and Cabinet (OPC) is conducting workshops in eight provinces to encourage effective monitoring and evaluation of projects.
Addressing one such workshop in Gwanda last week, Senior Principal Director in the OPC Mr Albert Tagiwa Chikondo said the Government has taken a step to institutionalise monitoring and evaluation of developmental results.
“In line with this the Government launched the National Monitoring and Evaluation policy last year. We are saying programmes and projects are being developed every time but we are not seeing feedback on their implementation. We had to make it mandatory that everyone and every institution should put in place monitoring and evaluation systems,” said Mr Chikondo.
He said the Government wanted to make sure that resources are used for intended projects.
“By continuously going to the projects and reviewing them we are making sure that we continuously update them to come up with what we desire,” he said.
Meanwhile, the Government is looking at reforming a number of key pieces of legislation affecting business as it moves towards improving the ease of doing business in the country.
Senior Principal Director in the Office of the President and Cabinet Ambassador Mary Sibusisiwe Mubi told Sunday News that the legislative reform was important to create a favourable environment businesses to grow. Ambassador Mubi highlighted that the OPC was playing an important role with respect to the ease of doing business reforms by coordinating the process.
She said reforming the business environment, a key component of the Zim-Asset blueprint, would help create investment and spur economic growth by removing a lot of bottlenecks.
“There is going to be some reforms to legislation. A number of pieces of legislation key to business will be reformed among them The Companies Act. It’s an important aspect of Zim-Asset which is talking about reforming the business environment so that entrepreneurs grow the economy, start companies and expand companies and that also it provides a platform for generating more investment,” she said.
She highlighted the need to relook the Companies Act, as pronounced by President Mugabe in his 10-Point Plan for economic growth last year.
Ambassador Mubi added that as part of the legislative reform, mechanisms will also be put in place to tax informal traders and ensure that they contribute meaningfully to economic growth.
She said the reforms will also ensure that entrepreneurs are able get business loans using movable assets as collateral as a measure to encourage local investment and create jobs.
“We need to look at how do we facilitate that even those who do not have assets to use their movable asset to get credit. How do we assist those in cross border traders in paying taxes, how do we create a much better system of paying taxes which ensures that the fiscus has enough resources for service delivery without creating too many bottlenecks,” she said.
Zimbabwe still ranks low on the World Bank’s ease of doing business global rankings for 2016.
Among some of the key indicators, such as starting a business, the country is ranked number 182 out of 189 countries, down from 179 last year. On the issue of construction permits, Zimbabwe sits at number 184, up one place from 2015. Zimbabwe maintained number 114 on registering a company. Overall, on the ease of doing business the country also maintained position 155.
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