Online Reporter
Charles Mavhunga
Tourism Branding
Every capital city tells a story before a single word is spoken.
Harare, the Sunshine City, the capital of a nation that fought for its own name, tells that story through its pavements, its markets and the dignity with which it treats the people who earn their bread on its streets.
Today, that story is being rewritten. Under the Second Republic, Zimbabwe is pursuing a deliberate and disciplined modernisation agenda and the question of street vending sits precisely where two national imperatives meet: the need to protect livelihoods and present a clean, orderly, investment-ready capital to the world.
These are not competing goals. Handled with intelligence and compassion, they have the same goal.
The concept of smart vending — formalised, serviced, digitally registered and well-sited informal trade — is how Harare can be both a city that feeds its people and a city that the world wants to visit.
Honouring the covenant
The covenant signed in blood by Zimbabwe’s freedom fighters was never merely about lowering one flag and raising another.
It was a covenant about ownership: that the African would own the land, own the shop, own the city and own the future.
The vendor at Copacabana, the cross-border trader at Mbare Musika, the young woman selling airtime along Julius Nyerere Way: these are the direct economic heirs of that struggle. Any urban policy that treats them as an obstacle rather than as a constituency betrays that covenant.
Equally, any policy that leaves them trading beside open drains, without ablution facilities, refuse collection, or legal protection, also betrays it.
The liberation promise was dignity, not merely tolerance. Smart vending is the policy expression of that dignity.
The global evidence
Zimbabwe need not experiment blindly.
The world has already tested both approaches, and the verdict is clear. Singapore faced mass street hawking in the 1960s.
Rather than banning it, the State built licensed hawker centres with running water, waste management and health inspection.
The result is a cuisine so celebrated that UNESCO inscribed hawker culture on its Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2020: informal trade converted into a global tourism brand.
India’s Street Vendors Act of 2014 legally recognised vendors, mandated Town Vending Committees and required cities to designate vending zones before any relocation. Ahmedabad and Bhubaneswar have since developed serviced vending plazas that raise municipal revenue while ending arbitrary confiscations.
South Africa’s Warwick Junction in Durban transformed a congested transport interchange into a managed market serving hundreds of thousands daily, complete with traders’ associations, storage facilities and the famous Bovine Head Market: now a heritage tourism stop.
Rwanda’s Kigali, arguably Africa’s cleanest capital, paired strict cleanliness standards and Umuganda community clean-ups with constructed markets and cooperative registration, turning the order itself into a competitive tourism asset.
Bangkok and Mexico City demonstrate the inverse lesson: blanket clearances suppress vending temporarily, displace it into side streets, and cost cities both revenue and culinary identity until designated zones are restored.
The Harare application
What would smart vending look like practically in Harare? Five concrete measures suggest themselves.
First, designated vending precincts with real infrastructure: Paved stalls, solar lighting, boreholes, ablution blocks and scheduled refuse collection, built through City of Harare and private partnerships.
The modernisation of Mbare Musika, the nation’s largest agricultural hub, is the template: a facility that is simultaneously a livelihood centre and a credible destination.
Second, digital registration and micro-payments: A single vendor database linked to mobile money allows daily fees to be paid electronically, eliminating cash leakages, creating verifiable trading histories, and enabling vendors to access microfinance and Government empowerment funds.
Third, tourism-linked craft corridors: Curated stone-sculpture, textile and Zimbabwean cuisine markets near Africa Unity Square, the National Gallery and Harare Gardens would convert vending from a branding liability into a branding asset, much as Cape Town’s Greenmarket Square anchors visitor experience.
Fourth, time-zoning: Permitting trade in the Central Business District during evening and weekend windows, with mandatory clean-down, keeps daytime business districts orderly while capturing night-economy value.
Fifth, vendor associations as partners, contracted for their own precinct cleanliness: Embedding the Umuganda principle in a Zimbabwean idiom of nhimbe, collective labour for collective benefit.
Alignment with NDS2 and Vision 2030
This approach is not peripheral to national policy; it is embedded in it. NDS2, launched by President Mnangagwa to guide national development from 2026 to 2030, consolidates the gains of NDS1 and accelerates the march towards Vision 2030.
Its 10 national priorities include infrastructure development and housing expansion, job creation, youth development and the creative industries, social development and social protection, devolution and decentralisation and image building, international relations and trade promotion.
Smart vending advances each one of these simultaneously. It is also consistent with the strategy’s international anchoring, since NDS2 is aligned with the SADC Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan, African union Agenda 2063 and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: frameworks that explicitly protect informal livelihoods while pursuing sustainable cities.
Conclusion: Vision 2030 commits Zimbabwe to becoming a prosperous and empowered upper middle-income society. No country has ever reached that status by impoverishing its traders, and none has reached it by abandoning its capital to disorder.
Harare’s path forward is the disciplined middle road: formalise, service, register, beautify and include.
Let the Sunshine City be swept clean by the very hands that earn their living upon its streets. That is the covenant honoured, the strategy implemented, and the vision delivered.
Charles Mavhunga is a Zimbabwean scholar, author, and cultural ambassador pursuing a PhD in Management at Bindura University of Science Education. He is the author of “Mbira Virtuosos: Stories of Zimbabwean Mbira Legends” (available on Amazon) and co-author of “Business Enterprising Skills” (Forms 1–4), published by Gramsol Books, Harare, and approved by Zimbabwe’s Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education. A recognised Global Cultural Ambassador and member of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA), he contributes weekly to The Herald, where he has published over 300 articles on tourism branding. He can be reached at charles.mavhunga@ gmail.com or +263 772 989 816.
