adminhow the country can focus its energies to achieve this.
Sometime this week a team from Buy Zimbabwe had a business lunch with Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries president Mr Kumbirai Katsande and the subject of discussion pretty much centred on this very subject.
In a clear example of the inclusive process, Buy Zimbabwe warmly welcomes the recent secondment of a senior CZI employee onto the Buy Zimbabwe Board of Trustees.
Particular mention goes to Mr Katsande for his leadership in the engagement process between CZI and Buy Zimbabwe.
Relationships such as these are essential in creating an economic environment that is suitable for growth.
I vividly recall Mr Katsande saying during the meeting that the most important task that we have as a country at the moment is to create an environment that is built on confidence.
He emphasised that this is the only way the country can hope to attract investments that will boost local firms.
One of the issues raised by Mr Katsande was that as Zimbabwe we need to pay particular attention to intellectual property.
He said there was need for Zimbabwe to build its own brands and get consumers to be loyal to these brands.
This, he said, was the only way that locals can create true value for employees instead of adopting and pushing brands that have been created by others.
He underlined that Zimbabweans should take pride in ownership of brands that they create internally.
Like Mr Katsande, I believe every Zimbabwean should be confident in their ability to produce innovative products.
We should never become warehouses for foreign brands. If Mr Katsande’s company Nestle Zimbabwe was able to build local brands such as Cerevita why can’t fellow Zimbabweans do the same. Entrepreneurship is the key word in economic development.
This is essentially what entrepreneurship is all about. My Own Boss Season IV — Buy Zimbabwe is currently on ZBC TV and Africa Unite, promoting youthful entrepreneurship in the country.
This show speaks true to the central focus of Buy Zimbabwe of creating pride in our local products, wealth in the economy and jobs for the multitudes of unemployed Zimbabwean youths.
I believe that this is what Mr Katsande was speaking about. Our processes on how to build the entrepreneurial base and empower our people should, however, be smart.
On a different note I recently spoke to the Deputy Registrar of Companies, Deeds and Intellectual Property, Mr Willie Mushayi, who emphasised that intellectual property rights are fundamental to economic growth.
This, he said, was because the rights allow producers to negotiate for better prices for their products when they are selling them on the international market.
Some of you might be aware of the rift between Seattle-based international coffee company and coffeehouse chain Starbucks and coffee growers in Ethiopia, which centred on the subject of intellectual property rights.
The rift came after Ethiopians increased the value of the coffee being exported to Starbucks in the United States of America in its raw form by applying intellectual property rights.
For years, Ethiopian farmers had been underpaid for a premium product simply because they failed to understand its real value based on quality.
As Zimbabweans we have a lot of high value raw materials that are leaving this country in unlabelled packaging, with absolutely no indication of their origins or any indication of the quality and amount of work that is put in by locals to produce them.
Following my conversation with Mr Mushayi it dawned on me that the Buy Zimbabwe insignia is essentially a Country of Origin Logo (COOL) that actually assures the rest of the world of the high quality standards of our raw materials.
Negotiations on prices can actually be made based on the endorsements coming from the country’s leading organisations that are working with Buy Zimbabwe to uphold these high standards on our local products and services. If we focus our energies in the right place, we can make this work.
Till next week . . . God Bless
Robert Garai Muganda is the Media and Communications Executive at Buy Zimbabwe. He can be contacted on 0772 714 233 or via email: [email protected] facebook: Buy Zimbabwe Campaign
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