Bulawayo City Council embraces green financing for infrastructure projects

BULAWAYO City Council (BCC) has said it is embracing new innovative ways of financing infrastructure development where the local authority is looking forward to embracing green financing, which include municipal bonds and carbon credits to modify infrastructure across the city.

Green finance is any structured financial activity designed to promote better environmental outcomes.

It consists of a variety of loans, debt structures, and investments that are used to promote the growth of green initiatives, lessen the climate effect of more conventional enterprises, or a combination of both.

The term “municipal bond” refers to a type of debt securities issued by local, county, and state governments. They are commonly offered to pay for capital expenditures, including the construction of highways, bridges or schools.

In an interview, BCC economic development officer, Mr Kholisani Moyo, said BCC exhibited at this year’s Zimbabwe International Trade Fair (ZITF) and the authority’s theme was “Driving Industrialisation and Trade through Innovation,” which was in line with ZITF’s theme; “Innovation: The Catalyst for Industrialisation and Trade.”

He said the council has a strategy and they want to see how they can use innovation to drive programmes around their corporate strategy.

Some of the issues include policy innovations, where he said the council has come up with policies and a corporate strategy which has a vision to be a smart transformative city by 2025.

Mr Moyo said the city has come up with innovative ways to achieve the corporate strategy, including utilising the city’s competitive advantage and innovations for infrastructure development.

“Innovation for infrastructure development, we will be looking at things like the market places that we are already developing.

We are also looking at the termini. We have done some innovations to support infrastructure development.

“On infrastructure, in the past we were relying on Government funding or city council rates to develop infrastructure, but we are now saying we want to embrace innovative ways of financing the infrastructure,” said Mr Moyo.

“In our story line we are looking at carbon credits, public, private partnerships (PPPs) and the possibility of municipal bonds to finance the development of infrastructure.”

He said they are moving away from the traditional ways of financing infrastructure development and now using innovative ways where they want to leverage on green financing.

Meanwhile, Mr Moyo said they also have the youth innovations where the Junior Councillors have made a drone which will be used to map out potholes, and measure the size of potholes and the material which will be required to repair the roads.

He also said the city is looking forward to innovating the small and medium enterprises sector.

“All this is meant to assist us to achieve our vision to be a smart transformative city by 2025 and we want to be in line with National Development Strategy 1 (NDS1) and Vision 2030 to be an upper middle-income economy by 2030,” said Mr Moyo.

“We want to follow the policy innovations, the strategic direction and innovations around infrastructure, youths and SMEs and innovation around finance,” he said.

“We are also encouraging private companies to modernise their buildings in the city as we look to changing the face of the whole city and providing trading space for SMEs.” — chronicle