One of the biggest assets in business is information! Information about business opportunities, current, emerging or future opportunities. They say information is power and if you have none then you can be at a great disadvantage.
Information about opportunities is obviously not easy to obtain and sometimes to obtain it you may need to part with an arm and a leg-it is pricey! Realising the gap in information, ZBIN embarked on a community service to enable Zimbabweans to have access to business information. This is our Objective Number 1. To provide a lot of information on opportunities in Zimbabwe for the benefit of everyone including our key constituency-The Diaspora! We also have in mind members living in remote areas where information may not easily be accessible.
Last Saturday was an outreach programme for ZBIN and we participated at a business forum conducted by church leaders in Marlborough. An invite came at short notice and we had to prepare some material to share with a group of Christian brothers based in Marlborough. At this meeting attended by close to 20 members, we emphasised the importance of being ready for business opportunity cycles, the skills needed to identify opportunities and gave a few examples. The good news is that Zimbabweans are taking an interest in business especially networking for business. Zimbabweans are getting into groups where they share information about business and investment. Some are pooling resources and taking advantage of opportunities that currently exist.
So at this meeting some complained about lack of capital. Some had brilliant ideas but could not execute them due to capital constraints. We then posed this question –‘Are you aware of current Government Initiatives that support small businesses?’
To our surprise no one could answer the question and this is of concern, serious concern to us. Without information you are at a great disadvantage as earlier explained. Without information you may be found complaining about lack of opportunities when some have access to this information for free.
We referred the group to recent initiatives which are publicly known.
- The Homelink Initiative of $15m that helps Individuals, Cross Border Traders and SMEs with capital which has an interest of 1%. A new initiative where collateral may not be a big issue as an applicant can find an employed relative who can be a guarantor of the loan.
- We also explained a recent Reserve Bank initiative that resulted in the establishment of a Women’s Bank Loan Facility at POSB. The facility is for women interested in business.
There are more initiatives such as the promotion of exports by ZIMTRADE, market surveys by ZIMTRADE and the order to reduce of interest rates to below 12% by the Government.
So information is available in newspapers and local radio but surprisingly few people take notice. For ZBIN members we have done a lot to provide information on Capital Access. Access to Capital is our number 3 objective and we did post about the Homelink Initiative, do follow our recent posts on this site for reference.
Do not miss formal Member Registration coming next week.
