By Rungano Dzikira
The National Business Council of Zimbabwe (NBCZ) together with the Ministry of Defence, Security and War Veterans is set to roll out micro-business loans targeted at empowering war veterans to come up with sustainable businesses to upgrade their livelihoods and enable economic development.
Addressing war veterans and war collaborators gathered for an empowerment business conference in Manicaland this Tuesday, NBCZ president, Keith Guzha said his organisation had come up with a business initiative aimed at addressing the business plight of war vets.
“Guided by section 23 of the Constitution which stipulates that war vets are set to be assimilated in all sectors of Government, NBCZ together with the line ministry came up with a comprehensive package to train war vets in business skills at district level, before taking it up to national level.
“The programme will begin with the training of trainers who will then be responsible for training war vets in larger scales into entrepreneurship development and management,” said Guzha.
The package which will be a partnership between NBCZ, and RBZ’s subsidiary, Homelink will see war vets accessing a minimum of $50 000 as loans (at 7 – 11% interest rate) for their business projects.
Guzha added that despite the constitutional mandate that war vets should be assimilated into every Government institution, very little has been done to integrate them into the national economy.
Though acknowledging the role played by Government in 1997 towards empowering war vets (when Government compensated them with $50 000) little was, however, done towards sustainable business empowerment, a gap that NBCZ intends to fill up.
He elaborated that since there is no Act of Parliament that recognises war collaborators, for now, this facility will largely assist war veterans only.
If successfully implemented, the businesses and projects would see the establishment of at least two war vets projects in each of the country’s ten provinces whereby one of the products will be ready for export, and creation of at least 100 decent jobs in each of the major projects that the war vets will undertake.
