Over the past few weeks I’ve been digging into Zimbabwean startups. I came across all kinds of them, tackling problems across every field you can think of. What struck me was how little it seemed to matter how well designed, engineered, or marketed the product was. Most of these startups just were just simply not doing well.
Every year a fresh crop of Zimbabwean tech startups launches mostly with a post on X, LinkedIn and Facebook. They get a bunch of likes and comments, the team behind the startup gets excited. The founder is convinced that they are the one that breaks the pattern. Eighteen months later the startup is nowhere to be seen.The collapse isn’t dramatic or sudden but it’s slow and quiet. The website suddenly stops getting updated and the social media accounts go silent.
A quick look at your phone’s homepage can show you how exactly bad it looks. Most of us barely have any local apps on our phones. The only ones we usually have are backed by already big companies like Econet and Simbisa. With the exception of your friend’s vibecoded app you have in the name of support of course.
It’s not that Zimbabweans lack good ideas or technical skill.Startup Blink Report ranked Zimbabwe 117th out of roughly 118 countries surveyed in 2025, with only a couple of dozen startups tracked in the entire country. Highlighting how startup growth in Zimbabwe is stunted.
There are plenty of reasons that cause these frustrating failures of startups and for the most part it’s not just limited to Zimbabwe only. Most African startups run into the same wall. But a few of these problems hit Zimbabwe especially hard.
First off there are no real investors looking to fund promising local startups. Ask most of Zimbabwean founders where the venture capital is and you’ll get a confused look. Most of the ideas that these startups are trying to build need real money to run, not LinkedIn comments. Company registration, actually building the product, cloud hosting, developer salaries, data bundles, marketing, and the diesel to keep servers running through load shedding all cost money nobody’s handing out.
Sadly the money is very hard to get. Most startups end up quietly leaving the scene after realizing that they had heavily underestimated the operating costs. Especially at the early stages when little to no revenue is coming in.
At the same time looking for global venture capital is almost a dead end. Only a handful of African startups have managed to do that. Most of the money flows to American and Chinese startups. And the rest goes to European startups. So at the end of the day Zimbabwean startups are left to figure out everything on their own with barely anything in their bank accounts
The other reason why the tech space in Zim feels underwhelming right now is also because the talent leaves as fast as it’s trained . The same skills that would make someone a strong technical co-founder here make them an easy remote hire for a company overseas. Every developer who leaves is also a potential mentor, angel investor, or second-time founder who won’t be recycling their experience back into the local ecosystem the way it happens naturally in more established hubs.
The regulatory side doesn’t do founders any favors either. Registering and running a company here comes with more paperwork and cost than it probably should. There’s also no Startup Act or anything like it, no framework offering young companies breaks on tax, IP protection or licensing the way countries like Tunisia and Senegal have already set up for theirs.
Founders also share the blame when it comes to their failures. Most founders fall in love with the code, get too technical and underperform on the business side of their startups. Most forget to ask themselves a simple question before they start,” does anyone really need what we are creating?”. Or at least they simply lie to themselves.
There’s also a copy-paste culture where the fifth ride-hailing app or e-commerce clone launches with basically nothing separating it from the four before it. The Zim tech space is saturated with the same apps that do the same things. Sometimes a small research is all it takes to avoid getting into an already saturated market.
Even when a product is genuinely good, getting people to actually use it is its own fight. Zimbabweans already have trust issues, from scams and e-commerce experiences that promised convenience and couldn’t deliver, and that kind of skepticism doesn’t disappear just because a new app has a nicer interface.
With all that being said Zimbabwean startup founders still have a lot to learn. However some of the hiccups they face are out of their control and only direct interference from the government in the form of policy, funding, or a regulatory environment that actually works might be of help. Even though there have been some policies like National ICT Policy 2022–2027 , POTRAZ ICT Innovation Drive Fund and National ICT Innovation Fund. Most of them have turned out to be empty promises that don’t yield much result.
I have no doubt whatsoever that a new wave of Zimbabwean tech startups that grow into genuine industry giants is coming. It’s just a matter of when, not if.
The post Why Your Phone Has Barely Any Local Apps: The Zimbabwean Startup Problem appeared first on Techzim.
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