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Acting Harare Mayor Councillor Musarurwa Mutizwa has invited the private sector to work hand in glove with other development partners in helping revive the ailing capital.
Mutizwa said Harare needs to build resilience to guard against shocks brought by unforeseen circumstances such as the COVID-19 pandemic.
Speaking at a meeting with visiting-United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) team in the city,
Mutizwa said Council appreciated the efforts made by organisations such as UNECA in helping council revive the economy after Covid-19 which worsened the situation.
“Harare is the biggest in Zimbabwe and it also constitutes the biggest GDP of Zimbabwe as a country and i want to believe our relationship with UNECA will take us somewhere in trying to generate the much needed resources skill and organizational efficiency that will see us recover from the problems that we have after Covid. Yes we could blame Covid but Covid came when we were almost down at our knees where we need a recovery plan before Covid itself now after it we are even worse than before, so we even need robust strategies so that we get ourselves out of this.
“As a build up to the resilience and development trajectory of the city we are looking for further partnership that would help us stabilize the City because at the moment our finances are not stable stretching from a cocktail of issues that are affecting us which left much of our economy traumatized. We need to formalize the informal sector so that we can capture the much needed resources from it.
“We need to survey for the informal sector so that we know their contribution to the National Economy because we do not know how wealthy is the informal sector, UNECA will help us on how to get out of the problems we have and can also give us knowledge on our GDP and financial recovery and potential we are obliged to have,” said the Acting Harare Mayor.
UNECA representative Edlam Yemuru added his voice saying they are glad to work with Harare as one of the other 16 cities.
“We serve and give technical support to our member state we work at the National level and we are actively working on the local level we are privileged to work with Harare, because it is the first city we have worked with in the Region. I would like to elaborate that this project is Global and it involves 16 other cities across World Regions and they are all implementing all similar approaches,” she said.
UNECA is assisting three cities – Accra, Harare and Yaoundé to develop and implement their COVID-19 economic recovery and resilience plans.
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