Energy and Power Development Minister, Hon. July Moyo, has commissioned the Tshitulipasi community solar mini-grid project in Beitbridge East, extending electricity for the first time to a primary school, twenty-seven village homesteads, eighteen business shops, two churches, a community borehole and three Government sub-offices.
The 120-kilowatt project, valued at ZWG16 million and implemented by the Rural Electrification Agency through the Rural Electrification Fund, was commissioned at a ceremony in Ward 1, Beitbridge East, where Moyo described the development as a major milestone for a community that had for decades relied on firewood and paraffin, with businesses forced to operate under difficult conditions due to the absence of modern energy sources. He said the occasion marked not merely the installation of solar infrastructure but the empowerment of a rural community long underserved by the national grid.
Because of its distance from the main solar plant, Tshitulipasi Secondary School received its own standalone ten-kilowatt system, ensuring uninterrupted power for pupils and staff independent of the wider mini-grid network. REA Acting Chief Executive Officer, Felister Makumbinde, said the project formed part of a broader electrification push across Beitbridge district, noting that as of mid-June the agency had already connected forty-nine of the district’s primary schools, with only eleven remaining, two of which are already under construction. She added that seventeen secondary schools and all twenty-eight rural health centres in the district now have electricity, alongside twenty government extension offices, thirty-two business centres and thirty village group schemes.
Moyo said mini-grids form an integral part of Government’s strategy to electrify every school and health facility in the country this year, describing decentralised renewable energy as the most practical route to reaching remote communities where extending the national grid remains costly or technically difficult. The Tshitulipasi commissioning was accompanied by the installation of twenty-five biogas digesters in the surrounding villages, part of a parallel drive to wean rural households off firewood and curb deforestation, particularly of the region’s mopane trees, which sustain the prized amacimbi delicacy relied upon by local communities.
Matabeleland South Provincial Affairs and Devolution Minister, Albert Nguluve, welcomed the investment, saying it was transforming lives in rural communities that had gone without electricity or modern energy services since before independence. The project forms part of a wider rollout of community solar mini-grids across Zimbabwe’s rural provinces, including recently completed plants at Nzvimbe in Manicaland, Gandavaroyi in the Midlands and Dete in Mashonaland West, as Government pursues its Vision 2030 target of universal access to clean and affordable energy.