Buy Zimbabwe, a lobby body for the promotion of local products has established a local content office as part of efforts to ensure that local content policy gets traction as well as to deepen local value chains.
This comes in the wake of increasing reliance on imported brands and services which often undermines locals in business.
In a statement, Buy Zimbabwe General Manager, Alois Burutsa said the establishment of the local content office follows the successful hosting of the Public Procurement Conference and Awards last month.
“The local content office comes after another milestone partnership between Buy Zimbabwe and Business Standards and Systems Certification to ensure verification of local content. Buy Zimbabwe will be working very closely with the secretariat for local content steering committee under the Ministry of Industry and Commerce,’ said Burutsa.
The conference was held in partnership with the Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (PRAZ) and ran under the theme Unlocking Zimbabwe’s economic potential through public procurement.
The conference underlined the need to put implementation mechanism to ensure that public tenders are directed to entities with high local content in line with the national industrialization drive.
“To facilitate the work of the local content office with members and stakeholders Buy Zimbabwe has employed a local content officer, Sebastian Sibanda, a founder and graduate of budding incubation hubs in Zimbabwe. Sebastian has worked for Old Mutual, Midlands State University and Banc Abc among many leading corporates.”
In his new assignment he is expected to work closely with the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries CZI, Chamber of Mines of Zimbabwe and the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce ZNCC, to ensure alignment on the need for Zimbabwe to reduce dependency on imports.
