Zimbabwe’s government used the country’s first National Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises and Cooperatives Indaba, held at the Harare International Conference Centre on 17 July 2026, to push through the most substantial legal overhaul of its cooperative sector in nearly a decade, an effort aimed at a longstanding and genuinely difficult problem: persuading formal capital to finance an economy in which most enterprise still sits outside the formal system.
President Emmerson Mnangagwa presided over the launch of a reviewed National Co-operatives Act alongside a National Cooperative Societies Development Policy that Cabinet had approved in December 2025, according to Minister of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development Senator Monica Mutsvangwa. In an interview ahead of the launch, Mutsvangwa said the existing law had not been updated since 2017 and no longer matched the sector’s realities, telling Herald Online that cooperatives now operate across virtually every productive part of the economy. The reform’s central aim, she said, is to give banks greater confidence to extend credit to cooperatives, a deliberate attempt to address a financing gap that has constrained the sector for years and that the Ministry has clearly identified as a policy priority rather than an afterthought.
The scale of that gap helps explain why the reform matters. The Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency’s 2025 Economic Census counted 204,798 operational business establishments nationally, of which 76.1 percent were classified as informal, a structural feature of the economy that predates this administration and that is common across much of the region. Of the roughly 49,000 formally registered establishments, only 51 companies are listed on the Zimbabwe Stock Exchange and the Victoria Falls Stock Exchange combined. Encouragingly, the exchange has already begun building complementary routes to capital, having agreed a memorandum of understanding this year with the Small and Medium Enterprises Development Corporation to launch the Zimbabwe Entrepreneurship Exchange, a channel designed specifically for businesses that conventional bank lending has historically overlooked. Taken together with the reviewed Act, these initiatives suggest a coordinated, if still early stage, push across government and capital markets to close the formalisation gap rather than a single isolated gesture.
According to Zimbabwe’s most recent FinScope MSME surveys and Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency data, micro, small and medium enterprises and cooperatives collectively account for more than sixty percent of Gross Domestic Product, even as independent economists have long noted that Zimbabwe’s informal economy is among the largest in the world relative to its size, making precise output attribution inherently difficult. Official data further show that smallholder farmers produce the bulk of the country’s tobacco crop, for which Zimbabwe remains Africa’s leading producer, and that small scale miners now account for over sixty five percent of national gold output, reflecting recent formalisation gains in artisanal mining.
Introducing President Mnangagwa, the Minister credited his administration with a 2025 growth rate of 8.5 percent, a reflection of genuine optimism about an economy that has, by every measure, performed strongly of late. The figure is worth clarifying for readers rather than repeating uncritically. At the Zimbabwe Economic Development Conference in September 2025, Finance Minister Professor Mthuli Ncube told delegates the economy was projected to grow by 6.6 percent that year, and the African Development Bank has since estimated actual 2025 growth at 7.6 percent, driven by a strong rebound in agriculture following favourable rainfall. The 8.5 percent figure appears to correspond to Treasury’s growth target for 2026, announced at February’s Mining Indaba in Cape Town, most likely reflecting a forward looking ambition rather than an attempt to overstate the year just past. Either way, the underlying trend the Minister was pointing to, a marked acceleration in growth after a difficult 2024, is well supported by independent data.
Delegates were told the Indaba’s opening day had produced a communiqué calling for accelerated policy and legislative reform, improved access to finance, markets and productive infrastructure, expanded support for women, youth and persons with disabilities, and the institutionalisation of the Indaba as an annual event rotating across Zimbabwe’s ten provinces, backed by a national action plan and a monitoring framework involving multiple stakeholders.
For entrepreneurs on the ground, the reform speaks to a familiar and deeply felt frustration. Ammaisha Dai, an independent small-scale miner honoured at the Indaba as its Best Woman Gold Miner, said the Act could begin to change how small businesses have long been perceived, describing a sector that banks have historically financed only sparingly because, as she put it, there was no trust. Her comment reflects a view widely shared among small-scale operators, that the reform’s real test lies in whether it changes lending behaviour on the ground rather than only the law on paper.
Some independent commentary published after the event was more sceptical, questioning how quickly high-level gatherings of this kind translate into changed conditions for entrepreneurs still navigating limited infrastructure and informal enforcement in their day to day trading. That scepticism is a useful counterweight rather than a dismissal of the effort: it reflects the reasonable caution of a public that has heard ambitious plans before, not a judgement on the sincerity or substance of this particular reform.
The clearest sign of whether this Indaba marks a genuine turning point, rather than simply a well intentioned one, will come in specific and checkable milestones over the next year: whether the reviewed Co-operatives Act is tabled in Parliament and passed in a form that gives banks the confidence Minister Mutsvangwa described, and whether the new Zimbabwe Entrepreneurship Exchange succeeds in drawing new issuers beyond the 51 companies currently listed across the country’s two exchanges. Both are within the Ministry’s stated ambitions, and both are worth watching closely and fairly as they unfold.
