Oct 7, 2026

Zimbabwe has earned a hard-won moment of stability. The test now is whether it becomes investment that reaches every village, growth point and corridor. Evidence from the UNDP Last Mile Project suggests it can, and that it pays.

By Ayodele Odusola, Resident Representative, UNDP Zimbabwe

Published on the margins of the Zimbabwe Economic Development Conference (ZEDCON) 2026, Bulawayo

Why Isaiah came home

In 2010, Isaiah Mlambo Mahlathini left Hakwata village in Chipinge District for South Africa. Like many young Zimbabweans, he went looking for opportunity because there was none at home.

Hakwata had no electricity. The nearest grid connection was sixteen kilometers away. At the local clinic, women gave birth by candlelight.

Today Isaiah is back. He runs a carpentry business, and his machines run on power from a 200-kilowatt solar mini-grid.

He did not return because of a policy paper. He returned because the lights came on, and with them the chance to earn a living. His story holds, in miniature, the case I made this week at ZEDCON: smart infrastructure should create opportunity in every part of Zimbabwe, wherever people live.

Stability is the foundation, not the destination

Zimbabwe meets this moment with real progress to show. The economy grew by an estimated 8.3 percent in 2025. In January 2026, annual inflation fell to single digits for the first time in over three decades. The exchange rate has stabilised, and the 2027 Budget Strategy Paper targets a deficit of around half a percent of GDP.

Progress on arrears clearance and debt resolution matters just as much. The Staff-Monitored Programme with the IMF is under implementation. A Debt Consultative Group, co-chaired by France and the United Kingdom, now sits under the Structured Dialogue Platform. Together with admission to the New Development Bank, these steps are rebuilding something the country has lacked for two decades: investor confidence.

The task now is to convert that confidence into investment. Zimbabwe invests around 9 percent of its GDP, against a sub-Saharan African average closer to 25 percent. No country has reached upper middle-income status at that rate of investment. Closing the gap, with public and private, domestic and foreign capital, is the central economic task between now and 2030.

One word to add to the agenda: everywhere

Smart infrastructure uses clean energy, digital technology and data to do more with less. It gives Zimbabwe a chance to leapfrog rather than retrace the costly path others took. ZEDCON's five pillars (sustainable energy, smart cities, ICT connectivity, rail and homegrown fintech) are the right building blocks.

But Vision 2030 commits the nation to leaving no one and no place behind. Most Zimbabweans still live in rural areas. If smart infrastructure stops at the edges of Harare, Bulawayo and the mining towns, we will have built a smart economy for some and an unchanged economy for most.

So, every infrastructure plan should face one simple question: who does it reach, and whose opportunities does it expand?

By that test, a solar mini-grid in Chipinge is smart infrastructure. So is a solar-powered irrigation scheme in Gororo, and a rural clinic that sends patient data to a district hospital. Smart cities, yes. But also, smart villages, smart growth points and smart corridors.

The last mile is good business

Some will call this a social argument: admirable, but expensive. Our experience in Zimbabwe tells a different story. Last-mile investments carry high social returns, and very often they make sound business sense too.

Energy that pays for itself. The Hakwata mini-grid was built under the Climate Adaptation, Water and Energy Programme (CAWEP) with the Government of Zimbabwe and funding from the United Kingdom. It cost about US$614,000 and powers 85 homes, 18 businesses, a school, a clinic and three community boreholes. Users pay a tariff that funds maintenance. Mobility for Africa, a private sector company, introduced electric tricycles to transport people and goods. That is not charity; it is a utility. It also has spare capacity waiting for the next welder, miller or cold-storage operator. As one local entrepreneur put it: "I'm spending less on energy and earning more." In one year, the impact on the primary school has been huge: teachers’ retention rose by 92%, pupil’s enrollment level from 600 to over 800, and pass rate from 60% to 76.6%.

Health facilities that save money. Since 2016, the Ministry of Health and Child Care, the Global Fund and UNDP have solarised 1,263 health facilities, about 70 percent of the national total, with over 11 megawatts of combined capacity. It is among the largest health solarisation efforts in Africa. The system at NatPharm's Harare warehouse alone is projected to save around US$150,000 a year in electricity costs. Every dollar not spent on diesel is a dollar available for medicines.

Water that becomes income. At the Gororo Irrigation Scheme, 72 families on climate-proofed land harvested more than 68 tonnes across three cycles, earned over US$64,000 and reached three export markets. At Vimbanayi, farmers are harvesting over three tonnes of chillies a day for private buyers. With an El Niño season ahead, irrigation that frees farming from the rains is no longer optional.

Hubs built to run as businesses. Village Business Units (VBUs) bring water, energy, food production and enterprise together in one place – and diversifying livelihoods from crops to animal husbandry and fisheries. Government has rightly insisted they must operate as businesses, able to attract capital for maintenance and working capital. We agree. That is precisely the point. UNDP has shown the proof of concept is practical: the VBU supported by UNDP, Nyamahumba VBU, Ward 6, Nyanga, was nominated the President as the “best VBU in Zimbabwe.”

The pattern is consistent. Reliable energy creates enterprise. Water creates income. Connectivity creates markets. Income creates the ability to pay, and that creates the business case.

The same logic runs through the other conference pillars. A revitalised railway is only as valuable as the feeder links that bring rural produce and minerals to the line. Extending connectivity to rural schools and clinics turns a mini-grid into a digital hub. The Nyamuroro Artificial Intelligence, Digital, and Innovation Hub (Gokwe North) training 50 youths and 300 teachers – is a good example. And a mobile wallet lets a household pay its electricity bill while giving a lender a repayment history. Fintech is the last-mile infrastructure of finance.

Capital is not the binding constraint. The match is.

The question is no longer whether these investments work. It is how to finance them at scale.

Public investment has a role, on its own and through blended finance. Official development assistance has a role too, but a specific one. Our projects are proofs of concept: they show that a model works, what it costs and what it returns. With aid declining globally, ODA cannot be the engine. It must be the spark.

That is why impact investors, who seek both a financial return and a measurable development result, matter so much. To understand what stands between them and Zimbabwe, UNDP partnered with the Zimbabwe Investment and Development Agency (ZIDA), with technical support from CrossBoundary Advisory. Together we produced Zimbabwe's SDG Impact Investment Map and an assessment of the enabling environment.

The Map identified 98 investment opportunities across agriculture and smart irrigation, renewable energy, financial services, manufacturing, infrastructure and housing. Their combined financing need is about US$923 million. Of these, 31 have been prioritised, requiring about US$535 million. On the supply side, it found some 85 investors whose mandates fit Zimbabwe's opportunities, 35 of them already active in the country.

The conclusion is striking. Capital exists, and some of it is already here. What blocks it are frictions. Last-mile projects are small, while institutional investors write cheques of five, ten or twenty million dollars. And many good businesses are not yet packaged the way investors need, with sound governance, documentation, environmental and social systems, and impact measurement. The gap must be filled.

Five actions to unlock investment for big development impact

1. Coordinate. Zimbabwe has strong institutions, but no single function aligning them around impact investment. A Government-anchored coordination function, working with ZIDA, would change that, as a national platform has done in Zambia.
2. Tell the true story. Investors still cite foreign-exchange repatriation as their top concern, even though the Reserve Bank's capital-in, capital-out framework now allows profits and dividends to be repatriated. The facts have improved faster than perceptions. Clear, investor-facing communication is one of the cheapest reforms available.
3. Prepare and aggregate. An investment facilitation platform could take businesses from readiness to financial close, and bundle twenty mini-grids or ten irrigation schemes into tickets investors can write. Kenya's pension-fund platform, KEPFIC, built a deal book of 19 opportunities worth US$2.5 billion this way. UNDP's Africa Minigrids Program is standardising mini-grid models across 21 countries so private capital can follow.
4. Share the risk. Zimbabwe can make fuller use of guaranteed instruments already on offer from ATIDI, the African Guarantee Fund and the African Development Bank. A domestic credit guarantee scheme, like the one Zambia co-designed with its central bank, is worth exploring. So is helping Zimbabwean banks secure accreditation to the Green Climate Fund.
5. Mobilise domestic capital. Around 74 percent of pension fund assets sit in real estate. Even a modest shift towards infrastructure and productive sectors would send a powerful signal. South Africa's renewable energy procurement programme mobilised over 200 billion rand of private investment by pairing clear rules with credible risk-sharing. Zimbabwe can design its own version.

What each of us can do

No single actor can close Zimbabwe's investment gap. Each has a part to play:

• Government can make the last mile an explicit part of infrastructure plans, public–private partnership frameworks and devolution budgets, and champion coordination on impact investment.
• The private sector and financiers can look beyond city limits: pilot one last-mile financing product, or co-invest in one aggregated portfolio.
• Academics and think tanks can build the evidence, measuring both social and financial returns so investors can price them.
• Development partners can use grants and technical assistance to prepare and de-risk projects, not to substitute for investment.
• Citizens and the diaspora are investors too. Isaiah brought his skills home. Diaspora capital can come home as well.

For our part, UNDP stands ready to work with ZIDA and our partners to turn proven models into an investment pipeline. We bring our energy, health and resilience portfolio and our global network to that task.

A smart country, not only smart cities

Multiply Hakwata by thousands of villages. That is what an upper middle-income society looks like: not only smart cities, but a smart country where no one, and no place, is left behind.

ZEDCON 2026 took place at the Zimbabwe International Exhibition Centre in Bulawayo from 29 September to 3 October 2026, under the theme "Smart Infrastructure for an Upper Middle-Income Society: Leaving No One and No Place Behind". UNDP has supported the conference since its inception in 2022.