ZIMBABWE wants to industrialise, modernise agriculture and build a knowledge-based economy. Government has repeatedly placed science, technology and innovation at the centre of this ambition. Yet there is a fundamental contradiction: Zimbabwe expects knowledge to drive economic transformation without having built a research system capable of producing and sustaining that knowledge at the scale required.
This is not simply a question of how much money is allocated to universities or whether individual researchers receive grants. It is whether research has been properly positioned within the machinery of national development.
Zimbabwe has had a national research institution for almost four decades. The Research Council of Zimbabwe (RCZ) was established in 1986 to promote, direct, supervise and coordinate research, and to advise government on research for sustainable development. The country also has universities, SIRDC and other research institutions. The institutional ingredients, therefore, exist. What remains less developed is the architecture connecting research funding, human capital, infrastructure, national priorities, industry and government decision-making.
South Africa offers an instructive comparison. Its research system is far from perfect. Its latest national R&D survey shows that gross domestic expenditure on research and development was 0,62% of GDP in 2023-24, well below its stated ambition. Yet South Africa has progressively constructed a national research architecture around the Department of Science, Technology and Innovation, the National Research Foundation (NRF), science councils, universities and national research facilities.
The difference is, therefore, not simply one of expenditure. It is one of institutional design.
For 2026-27, South Africa's Department of Science, Technology and Innovation has an appropriation of R10,4 billion. Its research, development and support programme accounts for 61% of the department's budget and includes transfers to the NRF, as well as support for postgraduate development and research infrastructure. NRF's funding framework provides separate mechanisms for research, postgraduate training, infrastructure and targeted programmes.
The significance is that research capacity is treated as something that must be built systematically over time. Zimbabwe needs to confront this issue.
When research funding is uncertain or fragmented, researchers are inevitably influenced by where funding happens to be available. Universities struggle to sustain research programmes, emerging researchers find it difficult to establish independent careers and promising research can stop at publication because there is no adequately supported pathway towards further development or application.
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This should not be interpreted as a failure of Zimbabwean researchers. It is a question of institutional design.
Zimbabwe's national research priorities were approved in 2011 to guide the allocation of financial and other resources towards research. Fifteen years is a long period in science and technology. Artificial intelligence, climate change, critical minerals, digital technologies and the energy transition have substantially changed the environment in which national research policy operates.
The issue, however, is not simply whether Zimbabwe should update its priorities. It is whether those priorities are backed by a predictable financing mechanism capable of sustaining research over time.
The 2027 Budget Strategy Paper states that government intends to enhance funding for universities, SIRDC, RCZ, military research and innovation hubs to deepen the national research base and support Education 5.0, innovation and industrialisation. This is an important policy commitment. But an intention to enhance funding does not, by itself, constitute a national research-financing architecture. It does not establish how funding will be sustained, how priorities will be determined or how research outcomes will be assessed.
That is where Zimbabwe needs to move beyond policy declarations.
The country does not necessarily need another research institution. It needs to determine whether RCZ can be adequately resourced and repositioned to perform a stronger national function in research funding, coordination and priority-setting. A credible system would provide predictable, differentiated support for basic research, strategic national research, emerging researchers, postgraduate development, infrastructure and innovation.
Government must also become a more deliberate user of research. If agricultural productivity is a national priority, ministries should commission research to address the constraints limiting productivity. If mineral beneficiation is central to industrialisation, research should target technologies capable of increasing domestic value addition. If energy security is a concern, research should address storage, renewable technologies and grid resilience.
This would change the relationship between government and researchers. Instead of research responding predominantly to whatever funding opportunities exist, government would identify important national problems and create mechanisms through which researchers compete to solve them.
That is the difference between having researchers and having a national research system.
Zimbabwe must also be cautious about excessive dependence on external research funding. International partnerships are valuable, but they should complement domestic investment rather than determine which national problems receive attention. South Africa continues to confront challenges around the sustainability and fragmentation of science and innovation funding.
The issue is ultimately larger than research funding. It concerns the kind of developmental State Zimbabwe seeks to build.
A country aspiring to industrialise needs more than physical infrastructure. It needs knowledge infrastructure: institutions capable of generating evidence, developing technologies, training researchers and translating knowledge to better policy and productive activity.
Zimbabwe has invested considerably in education and human capital. The next challenge is to create the institutional conditions under which that human capital can produce national value.
South Africa does not provide a model to copy wholesale. Its own R&D investment remains below its ambition. But its experience demonstrates an important principle: research capacity is built through institutions, sustained financing, differentiated funding instruments, human-capital development and infrastructure.
Zimbabwe needs to make that institutional transition.
The question should no longer be whether research is important. That argument has already been settled in policy documents.
The real question is whether Zimbabwe is prepared to finance and govern research as part of its development infrastructure.
Until it does, the country's ambitions for industrialisation, innovation and a knowledge-based economy will continue to rest on a research system weaker than the development agenda it is expected to support.
