The project
Twelve hectares on the Mutoko tomato belt. One processing facility. One captive solar grid. One thousand five hundred smallholder suppliers — organised, contracted and paid digitally.
At a glance
Freehold parcel in Mutoko District, zoned for agro-industrial use and adjoining the primary tomato-growing corridor.
HACCP-compliant line processing field tomatoes into aseptic paste, sauces and purées at Brix 28–30.
Ground-mounted array with lithium battery storage sized for twenty-four-hour autonomy at plant load.
Smallholder cooperatives under structured offtake, with input finance and extension agronomy built in.
Component one
A modular, HACCP-compliant line designed around Italian pulping, evaporation and aseptic-fill technology — proven in similar-scale plants across North Africa and the Levant.
Gravity-fed tip bay, optical sort, recirculating wash — water recovery above eighty per cent.
Hot-break pulper preserves colour and Bostwick viscosity; refiner to sixty-mesh as standard.
Concentrating to Brix 28–30 at low temperature; specific steam consumption 0.55 kg/kg water evaporated.
220 kg bag-in-drum aseptic packaging — twelve-month ambient shelf life, export-ready.
In-line Brix, pH, NTSS, mould count; third-party SGS verification on every shipment.
Component two
A 500 kW ground-mounted PV array with 1.2 MWh lithium battery storage. Sized to supply ninety per cent of plant load year-round, with grid fallback on the ZETDC distribution network.
Tier-1 bifacial modules on fixed-tilt racks, oriented for peak Mutoko irradiance.
LiFePO₄ chemistry, ten-year performance warranty, deep-cycle to eighty per cent DoD.
Displacing diesel-generation and fossil-heavy grid power over a twenty-year asset life.
Component three
Fifteen hundred smallholders — sixty per cent women — supply the plant under structured forward contracts. Input finance, extension services and mobile payments are bundled into every farmer relationship.
Hub infrastructure
The 1,500 outgrowers are organised around ten women-and-youth-led cooperative hubs across the Mutoko–Mudzi–Murewa corridor. Each hub owns and operates its own water, irrigation, input and agronomy infrastructure — funded by the project's concessional and climate-window tranches, transferred to cooperative ownership at handover.
One serviced hub per outgrower cluster — women-and-youth-led, registered as primary cooperatives, with title to the hub-level asset register at handover.
One borehole sunk per hub. Drought-proof groundwater access for ~150 farmers each, paired with submersible solar pumps — zero diesel, zero load-shedding exposure.
Each hub runs on its own dedicated PV array. No grid connection required. Funded from the climate-concessional and catalytic-grant tranches of the capital stack.
Hub-level fertigation infrastructure distributed to member plots. Forty-per-cent reduction in water-use intensity versus furrow-irrigated baseline.
Certified hybrid seed, balanced fertiliser and scheduled crop-protection — financed through the revolving input line and recouped at first delivery.
Each hub employs a cooperative-paid agronomist. Weekly field visits, IPM training, soil-health monitoring and financial-literacy modules for women-led households.
Execution roadmap
Term sheets advanced with Norfund, BII, FMO and SEFA. Due diligence commencement.
Senior, concessional and equity tranches signed; project company capitalised; ESAP published.
Groundbreaking, civils, solar foundations; first outgrower cohort recruited; first three Mutomato hubs operational with boreholes drilled and solar pumps commissioned.
Processing line installed and commissioned; solar array energised.
Ramp to twenty-five per cent utilisation; initial offtake contracts honoured.
Full ramp to twenty tonnes/day; DSCR stabilisation; 2X Challenge reporting commences.
Location
Mutoko District produces more than forty per cent of Zimbabwe's commercial field tomatoes — a century of agronomic know-how concentrated in one corridor.
143 km from Harare on a paved trunk road. Onward access to Beira (Mozambique) and Beitbridge (South Africa) export gateways.
Altitude 1,200 m, dry subtropical climate with 2,800 sunshine hours per year — prime for both tomato cultivation and solar generation.