BUSINESS REPORTER
Zimbabwe’s largest financial services group, Old Mutual Zimbabwe, through its Eight2Five Innovation Hub impacted startups and entrepreneurs at the Scholastica and Innovators Forum held at the recent Zimbabwe International Trade Fair.
The forum largely focused on the Eight2Five Innovation hub’s flagship incubation program, The Value Creation Challenge, which targets entrepreneurs, start-ups, and small business proprietors nationwide.
The programme aims at capacitating entrepreneurs through business development and coaching, seed funding, and acceleration.
The programme aims to build a quality community of small business owners while helping them develop business skills through strategic knowledge and skills transfer. This year’s it focused on entrepreneurs or start-ups within the creative industry including fashion, digital content creation, music and literature, sustainability and climate change, and emerging technology industries.
In addition, the Value Creation Challenge also aims to identify talented ‘fintech’ with innovative solutions and encouraged participation by female-led startups.
The ZITF Innovators Forum is an event that spotlights innovations by Zimbabwean young people and allows them to network and exchange knowledge with their peers, mentors and potential investors.
Since its inception in 2018, the Innovators Forum has brought together innovators in different track areas and through incubation by the event partners, Elevate Trust, some have commercialized into the industry.
ZITF’s Scholastica event is a dedicated education, careers and training expo attracting the region’s leading universities, colleges and professional training institutions.
Presentations from various speakers focused on upskilling participants in various areas including entrepreneurship, robotics, space engineering and personal branding.
Over 1000 participants mostly youths attended the Scholastica event, while over 100 innovators and start-ups participated in the Innovators Forum program.
As a Financial Services Provider, Old Mutual is interested in the youth and informal sector as these are excluded when it comes to financial inclusion and fintech bridges and lessens the financial exclusion gap.
“As a business, our contribution to financial inclusion is to create innovative financial products and support startups through the Eight2Five Innovation Hub programmes.
Eight2Five is an innovation hub that partners with entrepreneurs to achieve a shared vision of solving real world and business problems through technology. The goal is to provide an enabling environment for innovation and entrepreneurship for our startup and SME community” said Lillian Mbayiwa, the Old Mutual Group Marketing ,Public Affairs and Sustainability Executive.
