Vusumuzi DubeRutendo Nyeve, Sunday News Reporter
58 PERCENT of the country’s population are owners in dominant tenure status observed across Zimbabwe, according to findings as presented in the preliminary results for the housing characteristics for the 2022 Population and Housing Census.
An owner is one who owns the house or is in the process of buying it with a mortgage or through the Government’s home ownership scheme or is renting to buy.
This dominant tenure status is followed by lodgers who either rent the whole/part of a dwelling unit, which belongs to an owner/purchaser or is under a tenant. These constitute 19.3 percent.
Announcing the results, Zimstat Director General Mr Taguma Mahonde said rural areas reported the highest proportion of owner occupancy at 76.8 percent while urban areas reported the highest proportion of lodger occupancy at 42.7 percent.
“Coming to the types of dwelling units, nationally, 83 percent of the dwelling units were modern. About 16 percent of the dwelling units were traditional. Dwelling units can broadly be categorized as modern and traditional. Modern dwelling units include detached, semi-detached, mixed, flats/townhouse and clustered dwelling units. Traditional dwelling units are old style family settlements in which buildings are made of pole and dagga,” said Mr Mahonde.
Meanwhile, the distribution of households by main source of electricity is shows that while the majority (38 percent) of the households did not have any source of electricity, 34 percent of households indicated that they used grid electricity. The remaining 28 percent used off grid electricity.
The results further show that 65.7 percent of the population had no access to internet while only 34.3 percent had access to the internet.
The information provided for by the results is important, not only for providing indicators for the evaluation of living conditions of the population but also as a proxy of the quality of life and standard of living experienced by the population.
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