THE Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency (ZIDA)’s one-stop shop has started
bearing fruits with the centre ensuring efficiency for the investors and cutting out
bureaucratic processes, an official with the organisation has said.
The One-Stop Investment Service Centre (OSISC), which houses relevant departments and
agencies was established to ensure ease of doing business by simplifying procedures and
removing bottlenecks faced by businesses interested in investing in the country.
Addressing the Masvingo Business community during workshops facilitated by the Masvingo
Business Expo, OSISC chief facilitator, Never Nyemudzo, said they had already started to
achieve efficiency under the company registration department and plan to achieve the same
level of efficiency with other relevant desks.
“What the Government has done is to second specialists from different ministries,
departments and agencies to ZIDA’s one-stop shop, so that if an investor wants to understand
issues to do with Reserve Bank, there is a specialist from the Central Bank. It is such a co-
ordinated unit of the Government with specialists being supervised by the chief facilitator in
ZIDA,” he explained.
“The next stage is to make sure that all these people are able to start and finish a transaction
without unnecessarily referring back to the seconding authority. We have started to achieve
that, for example, under the department of company registration. If you bring your papers to
ZIDA, in 48 hours our desk will register your company. So we are hoping now to go desk by
desk to make sure we have the people with the authority and the requisite skills to start and
finish a transaction so that it truly becomes a one-stop shop.”
The major mandate of OSISC is to streamline and simplify all the process and avoid
frustration for the investors, and curb corruption, which comes from complicating processes.
“Our major mandate is to continue to streamline and simplify all processes that are involved
in the licensing and regulating the different investors that come into the country. That is the
major role. Every other function is underpinned by that one. It makes it simple so that we
remove all forms of frustration which naturally would lead to people asking for these brown
envelopes because when things get complicated people want to use their money to simplify
things, so the process must be easy to understand, easy to follow so that we remove all forms
of frustration from our investors.”
Meanwhile, Masvingo Provincial Affairs and Devolution Minister, Ezra Chadzamira, has
called upon the investment agency to decentralise to provincial and district levels.
“As Masvingo province we totally embrace our Government’s thrust to promote and facilitate
the industrialisation agenda with priority to develop and strengthening already existing value
chains as initiated in the National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1). The strategy also
prioritises decentralisation of industrialisation initiatives in line with devolution and
decentralisation policy. I therefore call upon ZIDA to decentralise to provincial and even to
district level.”
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