Online Reporter
Mthabisi Tshuma
GOVERNMENT, through the Ministry of Information Communication Technology (ICT), Postal and Courier Services, is working on expanding the National Data Centre to a Tier four capacity.
A Tier four data centre offers the highest level of reliability and redundancy, designed to be fully fault-tolerant with 99,995 percent uptime.
This means it has redundant systems for all critical components, allowing for maintenance without service interruption and ensuring that even multiple simultaneous failures won’t impact operations.
Speaking at the IndabaX Artificial Intelligence Symposium held in Harare recently, ICT, Postal and Courier Services Deputy Minister Dingumuzi Phuti said a fully digital economy must rest on four critical pillars, namely cloud infrastructure, data sovereignty, digital skills in AI, coding, robotics and robust ethical and governance frameworks.
“These are not just technology terms but tools of transformation. They are vehicles through which we will deliver better healthcare, responsive governance, competitive agriculture, smarter cities and thriving digital entrepreneurship,” he said.
“As Government, we are currently mooting the expansion of our National Data Centre to at least Tier four capacity, to bolster the resilience, security and scalability of our cloud computing ecosystem,” said Deputy Minister Phuti
“This is not merely about storage, it is about sovereignty in line with President Mnangagwa’s call for Zimbabwe to leapfrog into the Fourth Industrial Revolution by harnessing digital technologies to drive productivity, efficiency and inclusive economic growth.”
Deputy Minister Phuti said it is about ensuring that Zimbabwean data is processed, stored and protected locally, in compliance with the country’s laws and values.
“Zimbabwe’s digital future begins with sovereign control of our data. Under President Mnangagwa’s leadership, we are accelerating our transition to a full digital economy, anchored in security, accessibility and self-reliance,” he said.
“Without data sovereignty, there is no digital sovereignty. Without digital sovereignty, there is no national sovereignty.However, there is also an important economic and performance dimension to local data hosting.”
Deputy Minister Phuti said by keeping data within its borders, Zimbabwe can significantly reduce the cost of accessing digital services, especially for ordinary citizens and local businesses.
“Locally hosted content and platforms will load faster, with reduced latency and minimal buffering times, improving the overall user experience, especially for e-learning, e-health, streaming and cloud-based applications,” he said.
“Furthermore, this shift will make it cheaper for our innovators and entrepreneurs to build scalable applications without the burden of expensive international bandwidth or hosting costs.”
Deputy Minister Phuti said the Government strongly welcomes and supports private sector initiatives to establish local cloud services and data hosting facilities.
“These are the building blocks of a functional AI ecosystem. Without cloud infrastructure, AI cannot scale. Without local data, AI cannot learn or serve Zimbabwean realities,” he said.
