Govt takes deliberate steps to decentralise development

Lonster Mutata-Herald Correspondent

ZIMBABWE is preparing to take rural development closer to the people in one of the most significant shifts yet in the way Government plans and delivers development beyond the country’s major centres.

At the heart of the emerging approach is a simple, but far-reaching principle, development must be shaped around the people and places it is meant to transform.

The Ministry of Lands and Rural Development is building a decentralised development architecture that will strengthen the link between national policy, provincial coordination, district implementation and the everyday realities of communities.

Presenting before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Lands, Permanent Secretary for Lands and Rural Development, Professor Prosper Matondi, said the Ministry’s ambition was to ensure that its reach extended across the country, with development structures increasingly grounded in the communities they serve.

“Our aim is, therefore, to be able to reach out to all the provinces and districts,” Prof Matondi said.

The statement carries significance far beyond administrative reach. It represents an attempt to close one of development’s most persistent distances, the space between decisions made at the centre and the people who ultimately live with their consequences.

Under the emerging model, provincial structures will provide stronger development coordination, with the architecture cascading into districts.

This will create a more direct chain through which national priorities can be translated into provincial strategies and then into interventions shaped by the circumstances of individual communities.

The result is intended to be a Government development system that is closer, more responsive and more connected to the realities on the ground.

For Prof Matondi, communities are not passive destinations for Government programmes. They are important participants in understanding what works and where development should be directed.

“We want to work with you. It’s the incredible capacity of human resources in your constituencies that you want to take advantage of to work with very closely in order to plan, to direct the planning team to what is relevant and works for our people,” he told legislators.

That approach puts human experience at the centre of development planning.

A national plan may establish the direction, but communities know the terrain. They know where connectivity breaks down, where infrastructure is needed most, where economic opportunities are emerging and where different interventions must work together to produce meaningful change.

The Ministry’s decentralisation agenda is, therefore, not simply about moving administrative functions away from Harare.

It is about moving development intelligence closer to the point of impact.

The implications extend across sectors.

Land, roads, water, energy, schools, health facilities, enterprise and economic infrastructure do not exist in isolation in the lives of communities. They occupy the same physical and economic space.

Therefore, the ministry is seeking stronger coordination across Government and with local authorities, Parliament, the private sector, development partners and communities so that interventions reinforce rather than fragment one another.

Prof Matondi underlined this wider responsibility, saying: “As the authority on land, we are required to provide careful services for agriculture, for the environment, for social services in schools, in the health sector, for other small and medium scale enterprises, but ensuring that we also align with other sectors that are in effect, be it in the energy sector, for instance, ensuring that energy for all.”

That is the bigger picture emerging from the Ministry’s vision: land and rural development as a coordinating platform for the places where multiple dimensions of national development meet.

The economic dimension is equally important.

Prof Matondi said the ministry was seeking to broaden its intervention beyond the traditional concentration on agricultural production, with greater emphasis on agro-processing and industrialisation.

This gives community-centred development an economic heartbeat.

A community is not transformed merely because a project has been completed. Transformation comes when infrastructure expands opportunity, when local enterprise can grow, when production can reach markets, when services function closer to the people and when communities become increasingly connected to the wider economy.

That is why coordination matters.

“We want to build better connections with development partners for our development agenda to remain on course,” Prof Matondi said.

The emphasis is not on isolated projects or fragmented interventions, but on bringing different capabilities into alignment around a common national development direction.

The ministry is consequently building towards a model in which national, provincial, district and community-level action reinforce one another. The province becomes a stronger coordination platform. The district becomes an increasingly important delivery interface. Communities become closer to the planning process.

Government retains the strategic direction required to ensure that development remains coherent across the country.

The physical presence of the Ministry is part of that architecture.

Prof Matondi said the Ministry was working towards establishing a wider national network, with the ultimate objective of ensuring that “our offices are grounded in the communities where we work.”

That phrase captures the essence of the transformation.

The objective is not simply to have Government closer geographically. It is to have development closer intellectually, institutionally and practically — closer to the people who understand their communities, closer to the problems requiring solutions and closer to the opportunities waiting to be developed.

For rural Zimbabwe, that could represent a profound change in the development equation.

Instead of a model in which communities wait for decisions to filter down from the centre, the emerging architecture seeks to create stronger two-way channels: national priorities move outward, while community realities move upward into planning.

It is a model of development that listens without losing direction, decentralises without fragmenting authority and brings communities closer to implementation without weakening national coordination.

Its ultimate test will be measured not in the number of structures created, but in what happens in the lives of the people those structures are designed to serve.

Because development is most powerful when it does not merely reach a community — when it is built around it.

Source: Govt takes deliberate steps to decentralise development – herald

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