YOUTH Aspire Development Trust (YADT), an organization that promotes youths rights and sexual reproductive health rights (SRHR), through capacity building, advocacy and community mobilization has partnered with Zimbabwe Youth Council (ZYC) with the aim of capacitating young people around business formalization skills.
By Patricia Mashiri
Speaking during the training of the trainers session of youths in Chitungwiza, Joseph Mhasvi a Research and Documentation Officer with ZYC said they have been since last year, 2020 been assisting youths to formalize their businesses.
This came after we realized that many youth businesses were not recognized as witnessed by the COVID-19 youth relief fund application frequencies. As soon as we identified that particular gap, we engaged the registrar to assist our young people to formalize their businesses. We are rolling this program in all the ten provinces and we are very happy that the young people are hailing the program and some have already registered their businesses.
“Basically, we are here to help young people register their businesses as one of the major programs being spearheaded by ZYC. We intend to take this formalization scheme to greater heights. We also have engaged Zimbabwe Revenue Authority (ZIMRA) so that our young people will be tax compliant,” Mhasvi said.
To date, ZYC has managed to register 2263 different youth companies since 2020.
Meanwhile, Andromedah Naringo, Youth Livelihoods coordinator with YADT, said the event was a training of trainers where the young people who were trained at the session are expected to train others.
“We have two components that we focus on that is livelihoods enhancement and SRHR but this was focusing on entrepreneurship development because we work with young people who are in different businesses in the communities.
“We have benefited much from this session. Some didn’t know much about ZYC but I can surely say we had a lot to take home after the whole session. The event was helpful to the young people in the communities it was very educative and informative,” Naringo said.
The event also witnessed a young man, Moses Mazipetele successfully registering and getting a reservation for his company name after the name search process.
“I am into network marketing but I want to venture into solar installation and repairs. I benefited much from this training on how best someone can legitimately register a company and how someone can keep a track record of his company.
“I was helped to register my company. I was over charged by an agent when I wanted to do it via any agent. This has been really helpful to us as youths and I’m going to help a lot out there to register theirs also,” Mazipetele said.
Agents in Zimbabwe are well known for over prizing everything taking advantage that they will have the upper hand on everything.
Tadiwa Charenzva, a young female poultry farmer said “I have benefited from the worskshop. It has been very informative and with the information I got here I’m actually planning to go big. Youths should also engage in such settings so that they will also get knowledge on how to do and formalize their businesses.”
