Trust Freddy
Business Correspondent
Zimbabwe is ready to sign more investment agreements with India to support technology transfer, innovation funding and skills development, Skills Audit and Development Minister Dr Jenfan Muswere has said.
Speaking at the ongoing Zimbabwe-India Africa Tech and Entrepreneurship Summit 2026 being held in Harare, Dr Muswere said Zimbabwe can learn from India’s excellence in ICT and artificial intelligence.
Running under the theme “Building Africa’s Digital Economy: Innovation, Infrastructure and Investment Partnerships”, it has brought together captains of industry and techpreneurs from India and Zimbabwe to share ideas on leveraging AI to drive economic growth in both countries.
“India has managed to achieve excellence in ICT, in terms of many other branches including artificial intelligence,” Minister Muswere said.
“…We will learn a lot about their community information centres and how they aggregate and expand in terms of the telemedicine programme.”
Dr Muswere said the summit should move beyond dialogue to enterprise creation.
“This is an opportunity for both Zimbabwe and India to work together as a team in order for us to be able to develop ideas, but this summit is also about how best we can turn ideas into enterprises and also turn enterprises into sustainable and global enterprises,” he said.
He said innovation must be aligned to problem-solving.
“Many people have said necessity is key to invention. We have said many times that the Stone Age did not come to an end because there was a shortage of stones. It came to an end because citizens in particular jurisdictions decided to innovate,” he said.
Dr Muswere said Africa and India have similar population sizes, but India has taken the lead in innovation, start-up support and human capital development, a direction Zimbabwe is also taking.
He said the Government has put in place several policies to accelerate innovation, including the National Career Guidance Policy aligned to STEM, a scholarships policy aligned to the Fourth Industrial Revolution and a skills development policy focused on human capital.
“Africa as a continent has the most vibrant and energetic population, a huge young population, which could easily be utilised to propel Africa from a Third World continent to a First World continent,” he said.
“For this huge population, Africa needs to harness more human capital development in terms of aligning resources to human capital development and in particular to skills development.”
The two-day summit, the first country-level summit to be co-hosted by the India-Africa Entrepreneurship Forum, ends today.
