Picture a Zimbabwean accountant in Birmingham. It is Sunday evening. She has worked a double shift and is sitting at her kitchen table with a cup of tea, a phone in her hand and a mother in Harare waiting on the other end of a mobile money transfer. She sends three hundred dollars. Before that money reaches the Zimbabwean banking system, roughly twenty-seven dollars has already vanished in transfer fees. She knows this. She does it anyway. She does it every month. She has been doing it for eleven years.
She is not a philanthropist. She is not a development actor in anyone’s theory of change. She is a professional with disposable income making a deliberate monthly capital allocation to a country she has never stopped believing in. The question that Southern Africa’s governments have consistently failed to answer is this: why has no one ever designed a proper investment for her?
The scale of what women and men like her represent is staggering. According to the African Development Bank’s own African Economic Outlook published this year, Zimbabweans living abroad are now estimated to send home approximately US$3.5 billion annually. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe recorded US$2.45 billion in official remittance inflows in 2025, a 14 per cent increase on the previous year, with the largest sources being the United Kingdom and South Africa. The gap between the two figures tells its own story: a significant volume of this capital is still moving through informal channels because the formal system has not made itself worth using. At the continental level, African diaspora remittances exceeded US$100 billion in 2024, surpassing foreign direct investment in many recipient countries and dwarfing overseas development assistance by a factor of two.
These are not welfare figures. They are investment figures that the financial architecture of the region is almost entirely unprepared to receive.
Here is the structural absurdity at the heart of this story. Finance ministers across SADC have spent the better part of two decades building investor relations offices, commissioning glossy roadshows, flying to Davos, and offering tax holidays to multinationals who arrive with due diligence lists as long as their patience is short. Meanwhile, the most motivated, most culturally fluent, most geopolitically patient capital on the planet has been arriving by mobile transfer every Sunday evening, asking for nothing beyond the satisfaction of keeping a family afloat. Nobody has thought to build a product for it. Nobody has thought to call it what it is.
The transfer cost is one part of the scandal. At an average of 8.9 per cent for remittances sent to Southern Africa, the region bears the highest corridor costs on the continent. The United Nations has set a target of 3 per cent by 2030. The gap is not narrowing. On Zimbabwe’s US$3.5 billion alone, the friction charge currently consumed by transfer operators and correspondent banking arrangements represents a sum that would fund significant capital infrastructure if captured and redirected. This is not a fintech problem. It is a trade policy failure dressed up as a payment processing inconvenience, and it should be treated as such by every finance ministry in the SADC bloc.
But the deeper failure is not the cost. It is the framing. Southern Africa has defined its diaspora as a remittance constituency rather than an investment class, and that framing shapes everything that follows from it. It shapes which desks in central banks are responsible for this money. It shapes what instruments governments design. It shapes the narrative in which a nurse in London or a teacher in Auckland is seen as a source of household welfare transfers rather than as an offshore investor with a portfolio decision to make.
Israel has issued diaspora bonds for decades. India’s Non-Resident Indian bond programme has mobilised tens of billions in development-grade capital. Kenya has explored it. Nigeria has explored it. Zimbabwe’s Victoria Falls Stock Exchange, with a current market capitalisation of approximately US$1.45 billion, now provides the institutional infrastructure for diaspora-accessible hard currency investment. The AFRINEX Securities Exchange in Mauritius is listing continental corporate instruments accessible to offshore investors. The architecture is being assembled. The political will to accelerate it, to treat the accountant in Birmingham as a client rather than a donor, has not yet arrived with the urgency the moment demands.
There is an argument sometimes made in policy circles that the diaspora sends money because of emotional obligation and will continue to do so regardless of what instruments are available. That argument is both cynical and economically illiterate. Emotional obligation sustains the baseline transfer. It does not explain why a professional with surplus income would choose Zimbabwe’s capital markets over a British ISA or a US equity fund. That choice requires an offer. And Southern Africa has, for the most part, declined to make one.
The accountant in Birmingham will send her mother money again next month. That is not in question. What is in question is what happens to the portion of her income that exceeds immediate household need. That portion could sit in a UK bank account generating three per cent interest for a foreign institution. Or it could flow into a VFEX-listed counter, a SADC diaspora bond, a structured blended-finance instrument backed by the productive assets of a region she has never stopped calling home.
Southern Africa does not have a capital shortage. It has a failure of ambition. The continent’s most loyal investors have been standing at the window for years, transfer by transfer, year by year, writing cheques into the dark. The least their governments can do is finally open the door.
Farai Ian Muvuti, CEO of The Southern African Times and Founder of Sankofa Capital. He champions African trade, investment, and digital innovation, linking businesses with global partners.
