Zim-BEE - Boosting Export and Empowerment

The honey sector has high potential for sustainable and inclusive economic development, through its good production and marketing capacity and the creation of intermediary organisations.

However, the limited structure of the sector and its production and processing practices prevent it from realising the potential it could hold in Zimbabwe, in terms of:

• Preserving and developing natural resources and biodiversity
• Generating decent incomes for producers (a large majority of whom are women)
• Creating jobs by revitalising the microenterprise/SME fabric in the sector

The Zim-Bee project will therefore support the beekeeping sector through the national export promotion agency, ZimTrade, with the objective of generating economic opportunities for rural communities.

The Zim-Bee project is contributing to supporting the productive economy in Zimbabwe, by setting it on a sustainable environmental and social pathway.

The project aims to support all the stakeholders in a priority value chain for the Government, by drawing on its dual potential for:

• Reducing the vulnerabilities of rural communities, while strengthening the economic and social role of women and young people
• Developing an export sector for high value-added products, by structuring its operators and stakeholders to optimise the export capacity for high-quality honey and by-products

To this end, the project is based on three lines of action:

1. Support the Zimbabwean export promotion agency ZimTrade and strengthen its internal capacity.
2. Create an “excellence hub” dedicated to research, studies, and the analysis of honey through the creation of an analytical laboratory.
3. Provide technical assistance and increase the economic resilience of women beekeepers and the beekeeping sector in Zimbabwe.

Zim-Bee has been designed to serve as a pilot model, with the objective of subsequently replicating it in other export sectors identified by ZimTrade.

The support to the honey sector will include capacity building for the intermediaries between producers and export markets. The creation of a laboratory specialised in the analysis of honey will also play an essential role. This laboratory will ultimately be able to serve other agri-food sectors, such as juices, spices, dairy products, and horticulture.

This visible and sustainable strengthening of the beekeeping sector will also demonstrate France’s commitment in this region and its support for inclusive economic development.