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HARARE – The Zimbabwe Stock Exchange (ZSE) has received regulatory approval from the Securities and Exchange Commission of Zimbabwe (SECZim) to launch the Zimbabwe Entrepreneurship Exchange (ZEEX), a specialised capital market platform designed to improve access to funding for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) and emerging growth companies.

The approval marks a significant milestone in Zimbabwe’s efforts to deepen capital markets, broaden financial inclusion, and bring more businesses from the informal and semi-formal sectors into regulated financial markets.

According to a statement issued by the ZSE, ZEEX will operate as a dedicated entrepreneurship-focused exchange aimed at providing SMEs with alternative financing mechanisms beyond conventional bank lending.

ZSE Holdings Group Chief Executive Officer, Justin Bgoni, said the new platform is a direct response to the financing challenges facing Zimbabwe’s growing SME sector.

“Against the backdrop of Zimbabwe’s significant and expanding informal sector, a large number of viable small and medium enterprises remain excluded from formal capital markets due to structural barriers, prohibitive costs, and constrained access to traditional financing. The establishment of ZEEX represents a strategic response to this challenge.

By harnessing high technology to deliver an SME-focused exchange, ZEEX will formalise capital raising activities, introduce structured funding alternatives, and strengthen transparency and investor protection while simultaneously supporting innovation-driven enterprises and advancing the broader objectives of financial inclusion and economic formalisation.”

The ZSE said ZEEX will operate through two market segments. The first, ZEEX Private Markets, will facilitate private placements and pre-listing capital raises for entrepreneurs and early-stage businesses seeking growth capital. The second, ZEEX Public Markets, will provide a pathway for companies to raise funds from the public, list securities and participate in secondary market trading.

Market analysts view the development as one of the most important structural reforms to Zimbabwe’s capital markets in recent years, particularly given the dominant role SMEs play in employment creation and economic activity. Government estimates suggest that SMEs account for a substantial share of national economic output but continue to face significant challenges in accessing long-term financing.

Zimbabwe Following a Global Model

The ZEEX initiative mirrors similar junior and growth-company exchanges established in major financial centres around the world.

Perhaps the most notable comparison is the AIM, the growth-company market operated by the London Stock Exchange. Since its launch in 1995, AIM has enabled thousands of emerging companies to raise billions of pounds in equity capital through a regulatory framework tailored to smaller, high-growth enterprises.

Similar models exist globally, including the TSX Venture Exchange in Canada, the NASDAQ First North in the Nordic region, and the ChiNext in China. These exchanges were created to bridge the financing gap between start-up enterprises and the more stringent requirements of main stock exchanges.

ZEEX is expected to play a comparable role in Zimbabwe by lowering barriers to market participation while maintaining regulatory oversight and investor protection.

Part of Broader Capital Markets Expansion

The launch of ZEEX comes amid broader efforts to modernise Zimbabwe’s financial markets. In recent months, regulators have approved new initiatives ranging from digital asset tokenisation platforms to specialised financing boards for mining ventures, reflecting a wider strategy to diversify capital-raising channels and attract investment.

The ZSE said it is now finalising compliance and operational frameworks required before the platform becomes fully operational. A formal launch date will be announced once those processes are completed.

For Zimbabwe’s entrepreneurs, the approval of ZEEX could represent the beginning of a new era in which growing businesses gain access to the same capital market tools that have helped transform small enterprises into major corporations in more developed financial markets.

The post Zimbabwe Stock Exchange Secures Approval for SME-Focused ZEEX Platform appeared first on The Zimbabwe Mail.

Zimbabwe’s controversial Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 (CAB3) is facing an unprecedented legal and political backlash, with reports of death threats against Members of Parliament and accusations of ‘ghost stats’ and ‘legal gymnastics’ undermining the legislative process. Voters have filed urgent applications against 67 MPs, challenging the legality and integrity of the Bill, which seeks […]

The post CAB3 Under Siege: Death Threats and ‘Shocking Stats’ Exposed as Chamisa Speaks Out… MP vows to vote NO! first appeared on My Zimbabwe News.

Zimbabwe’s controversial Constitutional Amendment Bill No. 3 (CAB3) is facing an unprecedented legal and political backlash, with reports of death threats against Members of Parliament and accusations of ‘ghost stats’ and ‘legal gymnastics’ undermining the legislative process. Voters have filed urgent applications against 67 MPs, challenging the legality and integrity of the Bill, which seeks […]

The post CAB3 Under Siege: Death Threats and ‘Shocking Stats’ Exposed as Chamisa Speaks Out… MP vows to vote NO! first appeared on My Zimbabwe News.

Conjugal Rights in Prison: A Privilege for the Few, a Cover-Up for the Many? BULAWAYO – Within the imposing grey concrete walls of Khami Maximum Prison, a high-security facility on the outskirts of Zimbabwe’s second-largest city, the air is thick with the scent of overcrowding and the heavy silence of thousands of men whose lives […]

The post LULA LULA FOR INMATES: Prison boss says prisoners are now allowed to have sex while serving their sentences first appeared on My Zimbabwe News.

Some deaths do not end a voice. They merely change where we hear it from. Dr Alex Tawanda Magaisa died in June 2022, but in Zimbabwe’s troubled public square, his voice still walks among us: calm, learned, mischievous, morally alert, and stubbornly faithful to the idea that power must be questioned.

Many knew him as WaMagaisa, the writer behind The Big Saturday Read. But he was more than a commentator. He was a teacher of citizenship. He took the Constitution from the guarded language of lawyers and placed it in the hands of ordinary people. He made the law readable. He made power explainable. He made citizens feel that they had a right to understand what was being done in their name.

That is why remembering Magaisa today cannot be an exercise in nostalgia. It must be an act of civic responsibility. For Zimbabwe, once again, stands at the familiar crossroads where ambition dresses itself in legal language and asks the nation to call it progress.

Were Magaisa alive today, he would surely have turned his sharp eye to the so-called 2030 agenda: the attempt to extend presidential and other elected terms from five to seven years, thereby allowing President Emmerson Mnangagwa to remain in office beyond 2028. Reports indicate that the proposed amendment would also move Zimbabwe away from direct presidential elections towards selection by Parliament, a profound alteration of the democratic bargain established under the 2013 Constitution.

Magaisa would not have been fooled by technicalities. He would have asked the simple question that power hates most: why now? Why must the rules change when the end of a mandate is approaching? A football team cannot request another half because the scoreboard is inconvenient. A runner cannot move the finishing line because fatigue has arrived. In the same way, a political leader cannot treat the Constitution as a tailor treats a suit, loosening it whenever the body of power grows uncomfortable.

He would have reminded us that constitutionalism is not merely about what can be pushed through Parliament. It is about restraint. It is about the discipline of power. It is about leaders accepting that public office is borrowed, not owned. The Constitution is not a ladder to be kicked away after one has climbed. It is the rope that ties the governors to the governed.

Magaisa would also have seen the 2030 debate as a symptom of Zimbabwe’s oldest political disease: the fear of succession. In normal republics, leadership renewal is not a national crisis. It is routine. In Zimbabwe, succession is treated like treason, retirement like humiliation, and term limits like an enemy plot. This is why the country remains trapped in a politics of endless incumbency, where the future is forever postponed to protect the comfort of the present.

He would also have looked, with some sadness, at the opposition. Magaisa was never a lazy partisan. He believed in democratic struggle, but he also believed that struggle required organisation, discipline and strategy. He would have warned that anger alone cannot defeat authoritarianism. A movement cannot survive on charisma, slogans and social media thunder. It needs structures, values, accountability and patience. The tragedy of Zimbabwean opposition politics is that it often recognises dictatorship more clearly than it recognises its own weaknesses.

On the economy, Magaisa would have refused official poetry. He would have examined the ZiG not only as a currency, but as a question of trust. Zimbabwe’s central bank has pointed to lower ZiG inflation, including single-digit figures in early 2026, but citizens know from painful history that money is not stabilised by press statements alone. A currency survives when institutions are credible, policy is consistent, and people believe their wages and savings will not be ambushed overnight.

For the ordinary Zimbabwean, the test of economic policy is not in the elegance of ministerial speeches. It is in the price of mealie-meal, rent, transport, school fees and medicine. It is about whether a nurse can live on her salary, whether a teacher can feed a family, whether a graduate can imagine a future without first imagining an airport. Magaisa would have insisted that economics without human dignity is merely arithmetic in expensive suits.

He would have spoken too of the diaspora, those millions who left not because they ceased to love Zimbabwe, but because Zimbabwe ceased to make room for their dreams. They are praised when they send remittances, remembered when the state needs foreign currency, but often treated as outsiders when questions of political voice arise. Magaisa would have called this contradiction by its proper name. A nation cannot outsource survival to its children abroad while denying them a meaningful stake in its future.

On corruption, he would have been unsparing. He understood that corruption is not just theft. It is a method of rule. It decides who receives contracts, who gets protected, who is prosecuted, who is silenced and who eats. When corruption becomes the operating system of the state, elections alone cannot repair the republic. You may change the driver, but the machine still carries the same poison.

Yet Magaisa was not a prophet of despair. His writing carried disappointment, sometimes even sorrow, but never surrender. He believed in the slow work of democratic citizenship. He believed that truth may lose many battles and still remain the only soil from which freedom can grow. He taught us that the citizen’s duty is not to clap for power, but to question it; not to fear the law, but to understand it; not to wait for heroes, but to build institutions that make heroes unnecessary.

To remember Alex Magaisa, therefore, is not simply to mourn a brilliant Zimbabwean mind gone too soon. It is to continue his unfinished work. It is to read the Constitution carefully when others want us to sleep. It is to resist the abuse of law by those who know its language but despise its spirit. It is to insist that Zimbabwe belongs not to parties, factions, generals, billionaires or presidents, but to its people.

WaMagaisa would have told us, gently but firmly, that the problem is not that Zimbabwe lacks clever politicians. It lacks constitutional humility. It lacks leaders who understand that the mandate of the people is not a private inheritance. It lacks institutions strong enough to say to ambition: thus far, and no further.

And perhaps that is why his voice still matters. Because in a country where power often speaks too loudly, Alex Magaisa taught citizens how to listen carefully, think clearly, and answer back.

Dr Gift Mawire is a United Kingdom-based academic, political commentator and analyst. He writes regularly on public affairs, democracy, governance and political economy.

The post What Would WaMagaisa Say Now? Remembering Dr. Alex Magaisa in a Time of Constitutional Mischief appeared first on The Zimbabwe Mail.