BEDIA signed a technical agreement with the Zimbabwe International Trade
Fair Company (ZITF Company) last year to get technical assistance from the latter on running and marketing trade fairs. The first show they collaborated on in the US$85 000 (P5, 2 million) deal
was the inaugural Global Expo last year. Says ZITF Company's general manager, Daniel Chigaru:
"We signed a three-year agreement last year. One year into it, we are satisfied with what has been achieved. I know that the renewal of the agreement depends on how much the Global Expo gets established and how far our Botswana partners will have learnt from us. But we are confident that everyone is happy and the contract will be renewed."
This year the Global Expo will be held from October 17 to 20 under the theme 'Fostering Diversification and Global Competitiveness'.
With more than 30 years experience in staging trade shows, the ZITF Company organises the Zimbabwe International Trade Fair, a multi-sectoral and global exhibition held annually in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe's second largest city.
The company also organises smaller and more specialised annual exhibitions like MINE-NTRA for the mining, engineering and transport sectors, A'Sambeni, which is a travel and tourism exhibition exposition, PakPrint for the printing and packaging industries and Scholastica for the stationery sector.
Chigaru says work on the forthcoming Global Expo started during the ZITF last April in Bulawayo. Four officers from BEDIA attended the ZITF Week to acquaint themselves with the running of international fairs.
After the Zimbabwe show, Chigaru led a team of ZITF Company employees to Botswana where they designed preliminary programmes for this year's Global Expo. "I was in Botswana with our team of marketing and space management experts from May 10 to May 25," he says.
"We put together a marketing strategy for this year and conducted a number of marketing and promotion events in Maun, Gaborone and Francistown. Before our trip, we had four of their officers dedicated to working with us during the ZITF in April. They were looking at what we were doing."
Chigaru says during the marketing drive, BEDIA and the ZITF Company were telling
potential exhibitors of the benefits of participating in the Global Expo and advising them to book space by the end of next month, which earns a 30 percent discount.
The Global Expo is slightly different from the ZITF in that the former is chiefly a business-to-business exhibition with only one day open to the public while the latter reserves two days for businesspeople and three days for the public.
BEDIA usually brings Botswana companies to exhibit at the ZITF. However, for the first time in ten years, no Batswana companies were represented at this year's Zimbabwe exposition.
Chigaru says the agreement with BEDIA is the ZITF Company's first technical agreement with a foreign firm. The deal will help in improving the ZITF Company's income streams.
"We are earning foreign currency, although it is not much. The income helps us in that instead of approaching the fiscus or the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe asking for foreign currency, we use the earnings from Botswana to finance some of our operations, such as foreign advertising for the ZITF and our foreign trips," Chigaru says.
