HARARE – The Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) will hold its 2018 Congress and International Investment Forum at Holiday Inn, Bulawayo this week.
The congress will start from Wednesday, September 26 to Friday, September 28, 2018.
The annual gathering, which will run under the theme “From dialogue to implementation — it’s time to act”, will bring together business people, policy-makers, and academia, among others, to deliberate on challenges affecting the economy.
According to the CZI, several renowned local and international speakers have been roped in to help dissect various thematic areas.
“Some of the speakers are from IDC South Africa and Bowman Financial Group South Africa. We will also have the general manager of Eximbank of India and CEOs of local banks.
“We will also have renowned local business people like Jimmy Psillos, Kumbirai Katsande among others,” the manufacturing representative body said in a statement.
It added that this year’s theme was coined in a bid to shift the mindsets of all concerned stakeholders to move from “talking about addressing the challenges to taking deliberate actions.”
“It is more of action that produces the results that we desire. The aim is to get action on ideas, challenges and solutions that have been put forward and get commitments to towards creating conditions that drive the growth of business, encourage innovation and enterprise.
“We believe that enterprise is the best defence against poverty,” the CZI said.
The CZI, Zimbabwe’s single largest industrial manufacturing representative, is determined to take advantage of government’s willingness to engage industry.
“We are grateful to government for opening space for dialogue and allowing private sector through organisations like CZI to provide input and solutions to the challenges.
“However, after the discussions and interactions and agreeing on those things that should be done, the weakness has been on lack of implementation,” the manufacturing body said, adding that it is now time to walk the talk.
“For example, the private sector and government have discussed issues to do with ease and cost of doing business, interrogated the issues and agreed on specific actions to address the challenges. This we did through the various 100-day programmes cycles focusing on several thematic areas.
“From our perspective we have not implemented the majority of the agreed positions. The issue, therefore, is why has this not been done, and how can we get it done.
“We have had a lot of national blue prints and strategies, which have suffered stillbirth. In the private sector we have value chain studies and strategies which have suffered the same.”
CZI, which has invited the new Industry and Commerce minister, the minister of Agriculture; minister of Finance and Economic Development as well as the Reserve Bank governor, will also host Business Excellence Awards.
“We have the CZI Business Excellence Awards where we honour and celebrate the success and achievements of our own members in different categories which include Company of the Year Award, Exporter of the Year Award, Buy Local Award as well as Energy Efficiency Awards that we conduct in partnership with ZETDC,” the CZI said.
