The Nation the Small Traders Built: Inside Zimbabwe’s First MSMEs and Cooperatives Indaba — and Why 70% of Us Already Are the Economy
This week at the Harare International Conference Centre, President Mnangagwa opened the country’s first-ever National Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises and Cooperatives Indaba — and said something every vendor, welder, cross-border trader and cooperative member should hear: when we empower our local enterprises, we power the entire nation. He is not being generous. He is being accurate. The people the formal economy calls “small” are, by the Government’s own numbers, the majority of the economy. This is their story, told plainly — tichikurukura pachikuru — with the charts to prove it.
A First: The Nation’s Small Businesses Finally Get Their Own Indaba
On 16–17 July 2026, at the Harare International Conference Centre, the Government convened the country’s first-ever National Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) and Cooperatives Indaba, under the theme “Towards Vision 2030: Building an Enabling Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises and Co-operatives Ecosystem.” President Mnangagwa presided, touring the exhibition floors before the proceedings and — in his own words on the day — declaring himself deeply impressed by the innovation, resilience and quality on display at the Vision 2030 stands. Convened by the Ministry of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development under Senator Monica Mutsvangwa, the Indaba drew together government, the Reserve Bank, ZIMRA, SMEDCO, financiers, development partners, the Zimbabwe Chamber of SMEs, the Zimbabwe Cooperative Federation and entrepreneurs themselves.
The headline deliverable was not a speech but a policy: the launch of the Revised National Cooperative Development Societies Policy, intended to modernise how cooperatives are governed, registered and regulated. That matters, and we will come to why. But first, let us settle the single most important fact — the one the word “small” hides from us every day.
“Small” Businesses Are the Majority of the Economy
Here is what the Government’s own estimates say about the sector everyone calls small. Watch the rings fill — this is the shape of the real Zimbabwean economy.
(FinScope, 2012)
(FinScope, 2012)
An MSME is simply a small business. The vegetable vendor at Mbare, the welder in Kwekwe, the hairdresser in Chitungwiza, the cross-border trader, the tuckshop, the small farm packing avocados for export — these are micro, small and medium enterprises. A cooperative is when people pool their effort and money and own a business together — a savings club, a farming co-op, a housing co-op — one member, one voice.
Now the big idea: when the Government says MSMEs are 60% of GDP and 70% of jobs, it is saying that you — the ordinary hustling Zimbabwean — are not on the edge of the economy. You are the centre of it. The Indaba is, at last, the State pulling up a chair for the people who were already doing the work.
Look at This Chart, and Never Say “Just a Vendor” Again
If you want to understand the Zimbabwean labour market in a single picture, here it is. When a young graduate says there are “no jobs,” what they usually mean is there are few formal jobs. But work — real, income-earning work — is overwhelmingly happening in the MSME and informal economy. The chart below shows, in round terms, where the working nation actually earns its living.
This is why the President’s sentence is an economic statement and not a courtesy. A policy that helps MSMEs is not a welfare programme for the poor; it is industrial policy for the majority of the workforce. Get it right, and you move the whole economy. Get it wrong, and no amount of attention to the formal 30% will compensate.
The Road to Vision 2030
Vision 2030 is the national goal of becoming an empowered, upper-middle-income society by 2030 — the income band the World Bank currently sets at roughly US$4,500 in gross national income per person. The economy grew strongly in 2025 and is projected to keep climbing. The Indaba’s argument is simple: you cannot reach an upper-middle-income Zimbabwe by 2030 while leaving 70% of the workforce informal and under-capitalised. The climb and the sector are the same journey.
What the Applause Should Not Let Us Forget
This journal supports the sector and welcomes the Indaba — and precisely because we do, we will be honest about the gaps, the way a good friend is honest. An Indaba is a beginning, not an achievement.
1. The data is old — dangerously old
The most-cited hard numbers on Zimbabwe’s MSMEs still come from the FinScope MSME Survey of 2012 — which found roughly 2.8 million MSME owners, some 5.7 million people sustained by the sector, an estimated US$7.4 billion in annual turnover, and around 85% of enterprises operating informally. That was fourteen years ago. You cannot precision-manage what you last measured in 2012. A modern national MSME survey is not a luxury; it is the instrument panel for the entire Vision 2030 flight.
2. Informality is the real mountain
If ~85% of the sector is informal, then the sector’s greatest constraint is not talent or effort — Zimbabweans have those in abundance — but the absence of the formal footings that unlock finance, contracts and export markets: registration, records, tax identity, title. Formalisation must be made cheaper and faster than staying informal, or it will not happen. Punishment will not formalise the sector; incentive will.
3. From talk to implementation
The Minister herself framed the stakes bluntly at the Indaba’s approach — that the country cannot keep repeating in 2026 the conversations it was having in 2017. She is right. The test of this Indaba is not the quality of its panels but whether a vendor in Mbare can, a year from now, get a loan faster, register cheaper, and sell wider than she can today. That, and nothing softer, is the metric.
How Empowering One Enterprise Powers the Nation
The President’s line — empower the enterprise, power the nation — is not a slogan; it is a described mechanism. Here is the chain, step by step. This is the logic the Indaba exists to switch on.
Multiply that single chain across the millions of enterprises the sector contains, and you have the entire theory of the case. This is why a market stall is a macroeconomic unit; why a cooperative is a development institution; why the woman roasting maize on the corner is, quite literally, part of the base on which Vision 2030 must be built. Kukura kwenyika kunotangira mumusika — the growth of a nation begins in the marketplace.
Give the Small Trader the Respect — and the Tools
I have written this entry with charts because a picture settles an argument that words alone leave open. And the argument is this: the Zimbabwean who sells, welds, sews, farms, brews, codes and trades on the margins of the formal economy is not a problem to be managed. That person is the economy, and has been all along. The Indaba’s real significance is not the ribbon or the exhibition stands. It is the belated official recognition of a truth every Zimbabwean family already lives: we are a nation of entrepreneurs, and always have been.
So I welcome this Indaba warmly, and I will hold it to a single, unsentimental standard. Recognition without tools is flattery. If, a year from now, finance is still too dear, registration still too slow, markets still too closed, and the data still frozen in 2012, then the Indaba was theatre. But if the vendor gets her loan, the co-op gets clean rules, the welder registers in an afternoon, and the avocado farmer ships to Shanghai at 0% — then it will have been the moment Zimbabwe finally built its economic policy around the people who were already carrying the economy on their backs.
The President said it correctly: empower the local enterprise, and you power the nation. Now the sentence must become a system. Ipai vashandi vadiki chiremerera nemidziyo — give the small traders respect and tools — and this country will do what it has always been able to do. Pamberi nemabhizinesi madiki, pamberi neVision 2030, pamberi nevanhu vanoshanda. Forward with the small enterprises; forward with the nation they are building.
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