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Zimbabwe founded its first research facilities more than a century ago. It has relatively well-developed national infrastructure and a long-standing tradition of promoting research and development (R&D), as evidenced by the levy imposed on tobacco-growers since the 1930s to promote market research.

The country also has a well-developed education system, with one in eleven adults holding a tertiary degree. Given the country’s knowledge base and abundant natural resources, Zimbabwe has the potential to figure among the countries leading growth in sub-Saharan Africa by 2020.

To do so, however, Zimbabwe will need to correct a number of structural weaknesses. For instance, it currently lacks the critical mass of researchers needed to trigger innovation. Although the infrastructure is in place to harness R&D to Zimbabwe’s socio-economic development, universities and research institutions lack the requisite financial and human resources to conduct R&D and the current regulatory environment hampers the transfer of new technologies to the business sector. Nor does the current development agenda to 2018 contain any specific targets for increasing the number of scientists and engineers, or the staffing requirements for industry and other productive sectors. To compound matters, the lack of co-ordination and coherence among governance structures has led to a multiplication of research priorities and poor implementation of existing policies.

The Government of Zimbabwe is conscious of the fact that it will be unable to redress the economy and durably improve the population’s living standards, unless it manages to correct these structural weaknesses. In 2013, it appealed for UNESCO’s assistance in preparing an evidence-based policy analysis of its particular situation. The present profile of science, technology and innovation in Zimbabwe has been produced within UNESCO’s Global Observatory of Science, Technology and Innovation Policy Instruments (GOàSPIN), a relatively new UNESCO initiative which stresses the importance of having a wide range of policy instruments to ensure effective policy implementation. GOàSPIN is applying a new methodology to mapping research and innovation at country level, in order to inform the reform process and improve monitoring of national innovation systems.