The model was launched by President Mugabe in 2010 with a view to expediting the investments approval process by bringing all relevant regulatory agents under a single roof.
However, chief executive Richard Mbaiwa said ZIA had become a "one more stop" as officers seconded to the authority by statutory agents did not have powers to make necessary decisions.
As such, he said the officers were only coming to ZIA only to collect proposal papers to take them to their superiors for approval, which lengthened the process instead of making it shorter.
Mr Mbaiwa said this at the start of a two-day strategy workshop in Harare, ending today, organised by Government and World Bank to examine Zimbabwe's experiences regarding ease of doing business.
The country was ranked number 170 out of 189 countries in the world on the World Bank's ease of doing business rankings for 2014.
It is believed that the ease and cost of doing business determine investments and how far the private sector can drive economic growth.
"The real issue is that the model was based on physical presence where investors have got every (regulatory) institution as opposed to a single window, where the (investment approval) processes would be done in the background, as back office work, and not to provide another interface with the investor under a single roof," he said.
The delays in the investments approval process has been identified as part of a litany of reasons as to why the country is unable to attract significant investment, which totalled only $400 million last year.
"We have had a number of challenges regarding that process.
"First is the actual presence of those agencies and (secondly) the level of representation in terms of decision making, ending up with process where the officer just becomes another stop to collect papers and take them to their head office for processing," Mr Mbaiwa said.
Mr Mbaiwa said, effectively, this will not reduce time frames, in fact, it might add to it because the officers attached to the investment authority had no power to make the necessary decisions.
In addition, Mr Mbaiwa said that officers from some of the relevant regulatory institutions did not report for duty, making it difficult for the authority to expedite the investment approval process.
"What we have now sought to do is to put a legal framework under the ZIA Act to make the one stop shop a legal facility and that process is still underway through the relevant structures, where the institutions would be obliged to be part of the one stop shop centre and to process (proposals) within specified time frames," Mr Mbaiwa said.
Further, Mr Mbaiwa said ZIA was one of the strategic institutions targeted under the e-Government programme, which will allow on-line investor registration to fast-track the investments approval process.
The workshop to review the ease of doing business identified numerous bottlenecks posed by regulatory and administrative requirements.
These bottlenecks made starting a business in the country cumbersome and expensive.
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Quelle/Source: AllAfrica, 03.10.2014
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