Harare – The Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries (CZI) has announced the launch of the Zimbabwe Entrepreneurship and Start-Up Ecosystem Forum, known as ZIM-ESEF, a national multi-stakeholder initiative designed to bring order and coordination to the country’s previously scattered startup and entrepreneurship landscape.
The forum held its first meeting last week at Industry House, marking what the CZI described as a deliberate shift away from isolated, fragmented efforts toward a single, coordinated national ecosystem.
“We’re moving from fragmented efforts to a coordinated national ecosystem,” the CZI said in its announcement of the initiative. 
The forum is structured around a six-pillar framework covering policy and regulatory reform, ecosystem financing across the full capital stack, stronger innovation pipelines from academia to market, industrialisation and value chain integration, structured pathways from small and medium enterprises to scalable startups, and digital and emerging technologies as growth drivers.
The CZI said the broader goal is to connect policy, capital, innovation, and markets into one functioning ecosystem, with the forum serving as the platform through which all key ecosystem actors, including government, private sector, academia, and financiers, are brought together.
“Bringing together the ecosystem actors is the start to building an ecosystem by design,” the CZI said, adding that getting it right would move Zimbabwe closer to a startup ecosystem that is coordinated, financing-ready, market-anchored, and globally competitive.
The development comes as Zimbabwe’s SME sector, which accounts for approximately 60% of employment in the country, continues to grow despite longstanding challenges around access to funding, regulatory hurdles, and infrastructure constraints.
“The work now begins,” the CZI said.
