ZIMBABWE Building Contractors Association president Tinashe Manzungu has lobbied Government to urgently establish a dedicated mortgage bank, saying such an institution is key to improving housing delivery and attaining modern housing delivery with little hurdles.
Speaking on the sidelines of the ZBCA Annual Conference, held from November 4 to 7 at the Great Zimbabwe Hotel in Masvingo, Manzungu said the absence of a specialised mortgage institution had become the single biggest obstacle to housing delivery, job creation and growth in the construction industry.
The conference was held under the theme “Elevating Zimbabwe’s Construction Industry for World Class Excellence through Regulatory Reforms, Digital Transformation and Smart Construction” and brought together contractors, policymakers, financiers and innovators from across the country and the region.
Dr Manzungu said developers and home seekers were currently forced to rely on direct instalment sales stretching over five to ten years to pay for stands and houses because there was no widely accessible mortgage financing in the country. He said the model was slow, risky and excluded millions of ordinary Zimbabweans, particularly youths, civil servants and informal traders who could not afford to pay cash upfront.
“We are not just lacking financing, we are lacking a system to deliver. Unlocking the sector’s projected contribution of 12 to 15 percent of gross domestic product requires an immediate, structural overhaul of national housing finance,” Dr Manzungu said.
He said Zimbabwe required approximately US$16.5 billion in infrastructure investment between 2026 and 2030 across transport, roads, water and sanitation, energy, ICT, industrial parks, housing developments and smart cities, and that such an ambition could not be achieved without long-term finance.
Dr Manzungu proposed a specialised mortgage banking institution capable of injecting construction capital into development projects while at the same time extending long-term credit to buyers, so that ordinary citizens could pay for a house over 15 to 25 years instead of five years.
To support his call, he pointed to international precedents, including the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, which was established to support Nigeria’s housing finance system through the National Housing Fund. He also cited the Nigeria Mortgage Refinance Company and the Kenya Mortgage Refinance Company, established in 2018, which provide long-term funding to banks and savings and credit cooperatives for mortgage lending.
“The institution’s estate development financing arrangements are particularly relevant to Zimbabwe, where developers frequently struggle to obtain affordable funding for roads, water systems, sewerage infrastructure and housing construction,” Dr Manzungu said.
He said a mortgage bank would accelerate delivery towards Zimbabwe’s ambition of one million housing units by 2030 and help close Africa’s housing deficit, while creating thousands of jobs for builders, engineers, plumbers, electricians and suppliers and boosting demand for local building materials. He added that it would also give young contractors access to finance instead of being locked out by high interest rates and short loan terms, a concern that was underlined at the conference with the unveiling of the Young Contractors’ Desk.
Responding to the call, the Minister of National Housing and Social Amenities, Professor Paul Mavima, said Government alone could not solve the housing crisis and that the State would use land, incentives and policy to pull private capital into the sector.
“Government has said most of these initiatives we cannot do alone, they have to be the joint efforts of Zimbabweans,” Prof Mavima said, invoking President Mnangagwa’s “Nyika inovakwa nevene vayo” philosophy as the policy’s moral foundation.
Prof Mavima said under the National Development Strategy 2, Government had set a headline target of one million housing units over the five-year planning period, a rate of roughly 200 000 per annum, and that the ministry was actively working on a package of incentives targeted at financial institutions, aimed at encouraging them to offer longer-tenure mortgages at better interest rates.
The ZBCA conference, which has been the voice of the construction sector since 1985, also provided a platform for continental dialogue, aligning Zimbabwe’s construction sector with AfCFTA, Agenda 2063 and the Sustainable Development Goals. He said construction was not just about concrete, steel and bricks, but a strategic driver of socio-economic transformation, and that every housing project stimulated demand for cement, steel, bricks, timber, transport, engineering and professional services.
