Investing in Innovation

A Returning Research Chair Bets on Zimbabwe's Diaspora and Its Land

Khumbulani Mpofu left a research chair in South Africa to run Solusi University in rural Matabeleland. He argues skilled Zimbabweans are starting to follow him home, and Zimbabwe's Education 5.0 policy is asking universities to give them somewhere to work when they arrive.

Solusi University's campus sits about 50km west of Bulawayo in rural Matabeleland.

Khumbulani Mpofu took over as vice-chancellor of Solusi University in 2024, returning to Zimbabwe after holding a national research chair in South Africa. He calls his strategy for the university "revive, recapitalise, rebuild."

A returning research chair sees Zimbabwe's diaspora as an asset

Mpofu's own move is, in his account, part of a pattern rather than an exception. "Some companies are returning to establish headquarters in Zimbabwe because the labour they need for their operation to run efficiently has moved across the border," he says, pointing to skills, discipline and competitive wages, with the US dollar holding the currency stable. He wants Solusi's engineering programmes built around the same logic. "One of the key things that we're planning to do is put together an engineering faculty that is associated with industrialisation for most of our programmes," he says. "We create the curriculum, and we're trying also to make sure that there's an associated industry, so that our young people who come for these educational programmes can also participate in those industries."

Education 5.0 asks Zimbabwean universities to industrialise, not just teach

Zimbabwe's government adopted Heritage-Based Education 5.0 in 2018, a doctrine that adds innovation and industrialisation to the three traditional pillars of teaching, research and community engagement. The policy asks universities to apply local knowledge and resources directly to producing goods and services, rather than confining that work to industry. Bindura University, the University of Zimbabwe and Midlands State University have already built factories and production lines under the same mandate, part of a broader pattern covered in Innovation Report's look at whether the country's industrial ambitions are matching its results. Mpofu maps Solusi's version onto the institution's own tradition. "Our philosophy of education, even before Education 5.0, is educating the head, the heart and the hand," he says.

Solusi points to a solar ambition and a farming push under that mandate

Two projects carry that mandate at Solusi. The larger is a proposed 600 megawatt solar station, sited on university land Mpofu describes as unusually well suited to it. "Our university is located in the part of the country where there is a huge, vast amount of land that is well radiated even during the winter time," he says. "The sun is so hot that people even take out their jackets." Zimbabwe's largest operating solar plant, Melfort near Harare, generates 100 megawatts, commissioned in November 2025, so the proposed station would be six times that scale.

The nearer-term project is agricultural. Solusi is putting more than 100 hectares into cultivation and wants to process what it grows rather than sell it raw. "If it's sunflower seed that we're planting, are we able to process that into value-added products like oil," Mpofu says, "or if it is maize, are we able to convert that into meal, which is the staple food here in Zimbabwe, so that we can then participate in that value chain." The university already runs a hatchery producing 140,000 chicks a cycle and a clinic classified as a hospital by the state, evidence Mpofu offers that the model works at commercial scale.

Zimbabwean universities are asking for investment partners

Solusi is one entry point into a wider shift. Education 5.0 has pushed several of the country's universities toward the same position: research and teaching institutions positioning themselves as commercial partners for outside investment, on land and with labour they argue is underused. Mpofu frames Solusi's pitch in those terms directly. "Some companies are returning to establish headquarters in Zimbabwe," he says, "and we want the university's land and its people to be part of that."

Institutions in this article: Solusi University.

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