“Solar is the mainstay because we have not been able to reach access.”
Energy Minister July Moyo said this in Victoria Falls during the International Solar Alliance’s Africa meeting. He was explaining the government’s plan to equip 35,000 rural villages with solar-powered business units.
He was also saying something more important.
Zimbabwe has struggled to extend its electricity grid to much of the country, particularly in rural areas. Solar has become the answer because the grid has not.
There is nothing wrong with that answer.
There is a problem with pretending it means something larger than it does.
The government says it will equip 35,000 rural villages with solar-powered business units, developed jointly with the Ministry of Agriculture. A business unit is a facility. It is not a household electricity connection.
That distinction matters.
Moyo also said that more than 10,000 primary and secondary schools are about 84 percent electrified.
These are worthwhile programmes.
But neither means that 35,000 villages will be electrified in the conventional sense of the word.
The number is doing more work in the public conversation than the programme itself.
To understand why, consider the scale of Zimbabwe’s electricity problem.
The government’s own National Energy Compact, submitted under the continent-wide Mission 300 initiative, puts national electricity access at 62 percent according to the 2022 census. Ninety-one percent of households without electricity are in rural areas.
By the end of 2024, an estimated 2.55 million households still lacked electricity.
The more revealing number is the rate at which Zimbabwe is closing that gap.
The country is adding roughly 40,000 to 60,000 household connections a year.
Its population is adding about 118,000 households a year.
Zimbabwe is therefore not connecting people to electricity faster than new households are being created. It is falling behind.
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The government’s own compact estimates that more than 500,000 connections a year would be required to reach universal electricity access by 2030.
That is eight to 12 times the current rate.
Against those numbers, 35,000 village business units look very different.
They are useful. They may transform individual communities. But they do not amount to a solution to Zimbabwe’s rural electricity deficit.
They are a parallel system operating beside a national grid that is struggling to reach the people it was designed to serve.
This is not an argument against solar.
Solar may be one of the best ways to reach communities that are too remote or too sparsely populated for conventional grid extension to make economic sense.
Zimbabwe has some promising examples.
A 120-kilowatt mini-grid in Dete, a 153-kilowatt plant in Nzvimbe and a 200-kilowatt installation in Hakwata have brought electricity to clinics, schools, businesses and households.
Those projects matter.
Zimbabwe’s president has acknowledged that rural grid access remains “worryingly low,” at about 23 percent.
For a village that has never had reliable electricity, a solar mini-grid is not a publicity exercise. It can mean refrigeration for medicines, lighting for a clinic, power for a business and longer hours of study for children.
The technology works.
The problem is the language surrounding it.
Thirty-five thousand villages sounds like a national electrification programme.
It is not.
It is a programme to install a particular kind of solar-powered infrastructure in 35,000 villages.
Those are different things.
That distinction becomes even more important because Zimbabwe has been trying to expand rural electricity access for decades.
The rural electrification programme began in 1983. By the government’s own historical figures, only about 1,281 villages have been directly electrified over more than four decades.
The national grid has its own problems. It is aging. Transmission infrastructure requires investment. Vandalism remains a problem. And extending power lines across sparsely populated rural areas is expensive.
None of those problems can be solved with a larger announcement.
Solar allows the government to break the problem into smaller pieces.
One mini-grid can be financed, installed, photographed and declared a milestone. Development partners can support individual projects. Ministers can visit them. Communities can see immediate results.
Grid expansion is different.
It requires transmission lines, substations, poles, maintenance, capital and years of planning.
There is no single ribbon-cutting moment that makes a 40-year infrastructure deficit disappear.
That makes solar politically attractive.
It also makes the language around solar worth watching.
I do not think the government is conspiring to deceive rural Zimbabweans.
I think governments naturally describe their most visible successes in the language of transformation.
The danger comes when the language gets ahead of the infrastructure.
Thirty-five thousand is an impressive number.
But a number of villages is not the same thing as a number of households with electricity.
A solar-powered business centre is not the same thing as a village connected to a reliable electricity network.
And an announcement is not the same thing as an installation.
The government should therefore answer some basic questions.
How many of the 35,000 villages have been identified?
How many have funding?
How many have sites?
How many have contractors?
When will construction begin?
When will each installation become operational?
And how many households will actually receive electricity as a result?
Those questions would turn a headline into a programme.
Rural Zimbabweans do not need to be impressed by the number 35,000.
They need to know what it means for their village.
They need to know whether electricity is coming, what kind of electricity it will be, how much of the community it will serve and when it will arrive.
Until the government publishes that information, 35,000 remains a very large number attached to a much smaller promise.
Solar can help Zimbabwe close its electricity gap.
But the country should not confuse powering some parts of 35,000 villages with electrifying 35,000 villages.
The difference is not semantic.
It is the difference between measuring the size of the programme and measuring the size of the problem.
Source: Thirty-Five Thousand Reasons Not to Ask What “Electrified” Means – Zealous Thierry
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