Farai Mabeza
Zimbabwe will place value addition and import substitution at the centre of its industrialisation drive as government, business, investors, development partners and academia converge tomorrow for the inaugural Zimbabwe Industrialisation Conference and Expo (ZICE) 2026.
Held under the theme “Accelerating Industrialisation Through Regional Value Chains, Innovation and Trade,” the conference will focus on how Zimbabwe can produce more of the goods it currently imports while building competitive industries capable of serving regional and continental markets.
Minister of Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Zhemu Soda said producing more goods locally would create employment, conserve foreign currency, strengthen domestic industries and improve economic resilience.
“Zimbabwe continues to import products that can, and should be manufactured locally,” Soda said.
The value addition agenda comes as Zimbabwe seeks to position itself as a reliable manufacturing and trading partner as regional integration gathers momentum under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
But the country’s industrialisation ambitions will also confront a critical challenge: how to finance the expansion of productive industries.
Professor Gift Mugano of Africa Economic Development Strategies (AEDS), one of the organisers of ZICE 2026, said the conference would examine how existing pools of capital could be connected to bankable industrial projects.
Mugano said banks were currently holding between US$60 million and US$80 million from multilateral institutions that had yet to be deployed, partly because of a shortage of bankable projects.
“As part of our study, we have carried out bankable projects in priority areas, which we share in these banks,” Mugano said.
He also pointed to value chain financing as an important alternative to conventional bank lending, using Zimbabwe’s tobacco industry as an example.
According to Mugano, 95 percent of funding in the tobacco sector comes through value chain financing, while only 5 percent comes from banks.
The model, he argued, offers lessons for other sectors seeking to move up the value chain and expand production.
ZICE 2026 is a strategic partnership between the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, AEDS and Zimbabwe’s trade promotion organisation, ZimTrade.
As Zimbabwe seeks to deepen industrial production and regional trade, the conference will bring together stakeholders to examine how the country can mobilise capital, develop bankable projects and transform local resources into competitive products for domestic and international markets.
