Economic Empowerment
The tuckshop where neighbours invest from a dollar
Kimunila Zhakata's NhavaGx takes over vacant shops in residential areas, staffs them with local youth and lets residents invest from as little as $1 in the stock on the shelves.
Ten bottles of cooking oil. Five kilograms of sugar. That is what an investment in NhavaGx can look like: anyone in the community can invest from as little as $1, their money buys specific retail stock, and they can walk past the shop and see it on the shelf. "This makes investing tangible, low-risk, and easy to understand," Kimunila Zhakata says.
NhavaGx is operational in Chitungwiza, Zimbabwe. It takes over vacant convenience shops inside residential areas and employs trained youth from the same community to run them. Investors earn a percentage of profits on the stock they funded.
“Financial inclusion requires more than access. People need the knowledge and confidence to recognize and use the opportunities available to them. I believe that kind of understanding cannot come from theory alone; financial education has to be practical, experienced, and connected to people’s everyday lives.”
Kimunila Zhakata
His own research in one high-density location found roughly 60 unemployed youth per 150 households and about 10 vacant retail shops per 350 households. Combined with a 2022 FinScope survey done with the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, he puts monthly disposable income at roughly $5 to $20 per household. Empty shops, young people with no work, small sums with nowhere productive to go. NhavaGx connects the three.
It began, he says, "because of a problem I lived through, not because I wanted to start a company." While struggling with housing and trying to continue his education, he started a small tuckshop because it was something he could manage with what he had. He realised the bigger problem was not access to products. "Many people wanted to save or invest, even in very small amounts, but no financial system was designed for them," he says.
The work now is unglamorous, he says: stock tracked in hardcopy books and spreadsheets, profit shares calculated manually every cycle. It works but does not scale. So, as a Computer Science student at African Leadership College of Higher Education, he is developing a custom platform to digitise operations, accessible from a phone. There is a second part of the vision too: affordable co-living spaces for young entrepreneurs and students.
"When an investor can open their phone and see that their 10 bottles of cooking oil sold and their share is ready, that's when this stops being one shop and becomes financial infrastructure for communities the formal system has ignored," he says.