eBusiness Weekly
One of the major problems in doing business in Zimbabwe is tracking down suppliers with tens of thousands of companies and sole traders registered and a lot more not.
Business directories tend to be scarce or very light on lists and the good old days when a telephone directory was a good starting point, with the bright companies that assembled these for the old PTC also extracting the business listings, no longer with us. Mobile phones are very convenient but no one produces telephone directories for them. And no one lists email addresses either.
And even if you can get a list these are not checked out to ensure the company physically exists, is cleared with the tax authorities and has updated the records at the Companies Registry. Those things are needed if any complications arise and you need to pay a visit and “discuss” what happened to your order. People have to rely on word of mouth.
But there is now one fairly thick book listing several thousand companies that have had at least an initial check to prove they are more than a briefcase and the owner is not trying to run the business during visiting hours at the local jail.
It is the Government Gazette of April 1, price $280. This contains a set of General Notices 640-816 of 2022, a remarkable set of notices gazetted by the Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe in terms of section 4(2) of the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets (General) Regulations 2018 as read with the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act.
That sounds complex, as does the 177 separate notices, but what this book of 361 A4 pages does is list all the companies that have been cleared by the regulatory authority to bid on tenders put out by the central Government, local authorities, parastatals, national agencies and some State-owned companies. If you are not listed you cannot bid.
When you consider that each company gets just one line, unless they are listed in more than one category, you can see there are a lot of companies spread over the 361 pages
Each of the 177 notices covers a different category, with the ambit given in the introduction of each notice. This at least groups the companies together by what they do or sell. Almost all are Zimbabwean companies, but if you want to buy a locomotive or some other exotic piece of equipment you will find among the local agents the direct name, email address and phone number of foreign suppliers.
Regrettably there is no index of categories at least In the printed version.
However PRAZ goes a bit further and has a website, portal.praz.org.zw. If you open this and then click on “registered suppliers” you get a single small page. Click again on “registered suppliers” and suddenly it becomes exceptionally useful, with a list of all the categories and each one with a “view” button that leads to the list of approved companies in that category. If you know the category code you can go straight to the list, but this is not the sort of thing most people keep a record of.
This is a bit more user friendly than the Government Gazette of April 1 2022, but the categories are listed at random, not in alphabetical order or even in some sort of logical grouping. And the companies are listed at random as well, or perhaps in the order they were listed, so you have to read through the lot, which in some cases is simple and in other cases means going through over 2 000 entries.
There is no search engine for specific product or specific company; you have to enter the list through the category. The on-line lists have an extra bonus, in that they give the physical address of the head office of the company, which is not necessarily where they deal with the public wanting to buy something. One major chain of supermarkets and some department stores, for example, has only its Graniteside head office listed.
The lists only deal with what those obliged to issue tenders under PRAZ authority want to buy, although to give PRAZ its due there are some pretty sweeping categories. It just means that some categories, such as “Cosmetics Products” or “Funeral and Burial Products” have zero listings. At least this means that lipsticks and staff coffins are not perks at any of the State or semi-State entities.
But despite the limitations and gaps it is the most complete list of suppliers in Zimbabwe and well worth knowing about, especially as PRAZ have done some basic checks.
With this as a starting point there appears to be a wide-open opportunity for some hot-shot and innovative data and web company to build a really useful suppliers directory in some sort of joint venture or, more probably, some sort of licensing arrangement. PRAZ have legal obligations under the relevant Act and Regulations but this should not preclude licensing the data.
Even with what is there searches for town and some sort of stab at product could be put in place, and if the suppliers were willing to be more specific at listing products, which might require the licence holder to make e-mail or phone follow ups, then an exceptionally useful searchable data base could be created.
Once that was in place then others, who may not be interested in Government tenders or who sell stuff that the Government does not buy, might well want to climb aboard.
Listings would have to include data on whether the supplier was cleared or not cleared by PRAZ but at least with over 10 000 suppliers starting the process just the PRAZ list would be sufficiently useful to attract a lot of users and seekers so the problem of every listing web site, getting people aboard, would be overcome.
The Zimbabwean economy is becoming more sophisticated, a lot larger and tending to incorporate far more small and medium enterprises than before. Big companies can have their own websites that search engines will find but the smaller companies need to have a free or almost free listing service. Advertising revenue could possibly ensure that the service was free.
The major trade organisations like Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries and Retailers Association of Zimbabwe have never listed their members on a searchable website and it is quite likely that they include only the major companies in their sectors and have yet to figure out how to bring in the tens of thousands of small companies into their net.
So they are not perhaps the ideal sponsors of a near total business directory such as Zimbabwe so desperately needs. But they and the Ministry responsible for small and medium enterprises, as well as the Ministry of Industry and Commerce, could give their backing to some sort of enterprise willing to build this directory, with the PRAZ lists being an excellent starting point since so many companies are already included, enough to give that critical mass so it becomes usable from the start.
The ministerial involvement, plus that from the sector associations, would also be useful to help set standards for extra listings, since even with the usual disclaimers we would like to keep the crooks and conmen out, and could also ensure that the companies seeking listings were not scammed. We can all imagine the sort of problems that could arise.
