THE Tourism and Hospitality Industry ministry deserves credit for a structurally significant decision made in 2025.
For years, Bulawayo had hosted the Sanganai/Hlanganani World Tourism Expo with distinction, establishing it as one of Africa’s leading tourism showcases.
Rather than keep the platform centred on its traditional home, the ministry rotated it to Mutare, Manicaland, for the first time in the expo’s modern history — the 18th edition, fittingly named Kumbanayi, “get-together” in the province’s dialect.
This was devolution as an economic strategy: distributing the exposure, visitor traffic and investment interest that hosting generates beyond the country’s established tourism centres. The model is already scaling — Masvingo will host the 2026 edition of Sanganai/Hlanganani from 9 to 12 September, under the theme Dzimbahwe, drawing on the enduring heritage of Great Zimbabwe.
The lesson from Mutare is that changing the host city can work best when the move is accompanied by investment and coordination. The ministry backed the shift with real capital allocation, not just a change of venue: Grand Reef Aerodrome was refurbished, roads serving Mutarazi Falls received attention, and a rail service was relaunched to move visitors from Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare. More than 400 exhibitors participated and all 10 of Manicaland’s local authorities — including both Chipinge Town and rural district councils — coordinated to market the province as a single destination rather than as fragmented, competing attractions.
That coordination is the harder policy achievement, and it is the one worth replicating.
An expo, however, is a three-day event but the return on it plays out over years. The real test is whether the infrastructure keeps serving visitors, whether buyer meetings convert into bookings and investment, and whether operators keep reinvesting. Guesthouses and lodges in Manicaland scaled up ahead of the expo to absorb the accommodation surge — an encouraging market signal. The next strategic step, particularly for districts like Chipinge, is to develop conferencing, business and other visitor experiences that encourage tourists to stay longer and spread their spending across accommodation, restaurants, transport and local attractions.
Kumbanayi has shown that taking the expo beyond the traditional venue can work; the next challenge is to turn that visibility into sustained investment, visitation and economic activity throughout the year.
A value chain, not a postcard
Chipinge and its surrounding areas are home to assets whose economic value extends far beyond their scenic appeal. Its natural hot springs — with water surfacing at temperatures above 60°C and forming part of more than 30 such sites identified nationally — represent a genuine wellness-tourism
opportunity.
While these attractions are already part of the area’s tourism story, there is considerable scope to take their promotion and commercial development to another level, turning natural assets into experiences that attract visitors, extend stays and generate greater value for local communities and businesses. The district’s elevation above 1 100 metres and roughly 1,100mm of annual rainfall give it a durable comparative advantage in tea, one Tanganda Tea Company has built on since 1924; a century later, Chipinge’s estates still export roughly 80% of output.
Macadamia arrived only in 1965, via seedlings imported from Australia and California, and the district now accounts for the bulk of Zimbabwe’s macadamia production, almost entirely export-oriented — a case study in a local economy moving deliberately up the value chain as global demand shifted.
This is the profile of a district that has repeatedly repositioned itself around structural opportunity, not one that has simply waited for tourists to arrive.
That structural weight is not confined to the estates. Chipinge town itself carries a substantial formal commercial footprint — a leading beverages manufacturer, a major dairy and food-products producer, and national retail and wholesale chains anchor a local economy already channelling significant daily spending, from major employers down to everyday household transactions. This is a functioning commercial centre in its own right, not a service outpost for surrounding farms — the opportunity is not to create an economy from scratch, but to connect economic flows that already exist to a stronger tourism and investment proposition.
The anchor asset the road doesn’t yet serve
Thirty kilometres south of Chipinge town sits Chirinda Forest — the southernmost tropical rainforest on the African continent, a 950-hectare reserve protected since 1951, under scientific study since 1900, home to 73 recorded bird species and the Big Tree, a national monument red mahogany standing roughly 54 metres tall with a base circumference of over five metres and an estimated age exceeding a thousand years. Assets of this calibre are rare on the continent.
Positioned correctly, Chirinda is not a peripheral attraction but a potential anchor for an Eastern Highlands eco-tourism circuit, on par with how Manicaland has just marketed Mutarazi Falls.
The site also has a documented history of converting natural capital into structured economic activity: a mission established in 1892 grew into a hospital by 1912, an agricultural programme from 1919 introduced irrigation methods later extended to the Nyanyadzi scheme and a carpentry operation founded in 1903 had become a sawmill by 1909, producing skilled tradespeople whose work carried the Mount Selinda name nationally. A few kilometres away, that same mission legacy produced Mount Selinda High School, still among the country’s stronger-performing boarding schools, with alumni including constitutional law scholar Professor Lovemore Madhuku. The corridor’s track record is not tourism potential in the abstract — it is a demonstrated capacity to generate skills, institutions and export activity from the same footprint, repeatedly, over more than a century.
What the access gap is costing
None of this changes the fact that the final stretch of road into Chirinda needs urgent attention. Communities have organised informal repairs between grading seasons because the road constrains daily economic life and health workers have flagged ambulances struggling through the stretch once rains set in — a safety issue that resurfaces every wet season. To be clear, this is not government inaction: the Chipinge-Mount Selinda Road sits on the State’s own project list and officials have referenced ongoing works, consistent with the infrastructure push Mutare received ahead of Kumbanayi. The issue is pace against stakes — a continentally rare forest asset, export-earning estates and a nationally-competitive school all sitting on one under-resourced corridor.
The investment case
That is precisely why focus should now be on accelerating the plans already underway. The rehabilitation effort provides a foundation on which additional resources can be coordinated around the stretch, rather than treating the road as an entirely new infrastructure project. The distance is relatively short, the economic assets it connects are significant and the potential returns extend well beyond transport itself. A targeted additional commitment could, therefore, accelerate completion while unlocking value across tourism, agriculture and education — turning an existing infrastructure effort into a much broader economic opportunity.
The return is quantifiable. Just to illustrate, say improved access lifted Chirinda’s visitor numbers by 2 000 a year, at an average local spend of US$250-US$400 on accommodation, transport, meals, guiding and conservation fees, that is US$500 000-US$800 000 in additional annual tourism spending. At 5 000 additional visitors, the range rises to US$1,25 million-US$2 million a year.
These are illustrative scenarios, not forecasts, but they show the economic value that better access can unlock — even before counting revenue from guided walks, birding, photography, ecology field trips and research tourism beyond the peak season.
Zambia offers a regional benchmark for what access-led tourism investment can return: the country recorded 2,3 million international arrivals in 2025 and its tourism ministry reported the sector added roughly 156 000 jobs in the final quarter alone, on the back of sustained investment in access infrastructure to its attractions.
The strategic lesson for Chipinge is that road access is not peripheral to the tourism product — it is a core input to it, with the same road simultaneously de-risking agricultural logistics and improving access to a school producing national-level talent.
This is not simply a case for fixing a road; it is a case for unlocking economic value, but a modest investment with the potential to generate returns across tourism, agriculture and education.
It is a case for believing in Zimbabwe — in the extraordinary natural wealth of Chirinda, in the warmth and hospitality of the people of Chipinge and in the Tourism ministry’s demonstrated commitment to unlocking the country’s tourism potential.
Chirinda deserves to become more than a beautiful forest known to those who already know it; it should become an icon of Zimbabwe, creating jobs, enterprise and pride while earning its place alongside the country’s best-known destinations. Zimbabwe has the forest, Chipinge has the people and the ministry has shown the will. What is needed now is the access to bring them together.
The road to Chirinda should not be the barrier to its story; it should be the road that opens it.
The post Chirinda Rainforest: Zimbabwe’s next tourism icon waiting to be unlocked appeared first on newsday.
