Dear Zimbabwe,

The ground beneath you has found a new price. In the first six months of 2026 you exported $782 million of lithium products, up from $237 million a year earlier, as reported by the finance minister. You have required more of it to be processed at home before it leaves. Most of the electricity you generate, 87.5 percent in 2021, comes from renewable sources, from Kariba and the Zambezi.

Remittances from family abroad equal 8.5 percent of your economy, a sign of how much work your people find outside the country. The World Bank operations on record are small health grants. The largest flows of capital into Zimbabwe today are not development finance at all: they are the mining investments behind the lithium boom.

The work ahead is plain, and it is worth saying plainly. Only twenty-four in every hundred of you have a safely managed toilet at home. Only twenty-six in every hundred of you drink safely managed water at home. Seventy in every hundred of you cannot always count on enough good food. Shelter sets your Coverage today, at 23.6 out of 100, with water and food close behind. Each of them is within your reach.

A mining boom is the moment to decide where its revenue goes. Each tonne exported can carry a share pledged to water, care and homes, and each processing plant can be sited to bring power and work to the towns around it.

Now imagine that same resolve turned toward every home in the country. Picture Perfect Zimbabwe: a morning when every family cooks with clean fuel and sits down to a full table; when every tap runs clean and every home has a safe toilet; when every child walks to a school where a teacher is waiting, and reads with ease by the age of ten; when every mother lives within reach of a clinic with the lights on, and every young person finds work that pays. And no Zimbabwean falls below a decent life, because the nation has decided that none will.

“The world needs your lithium for its batteries. Let it power a decent life at home first.”

So this is an invitation. Bring your vision, your story and your solutions to the Perfect Zimbabwe Design Studio, and join the Co-designers who are already imagining what comes next. Perfect Zimbabwe will not be designed for you. It will be designed by you.