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Zvamaida Murwira Senior Reporter
Government has secured funding for the mapping of farms to enable the issuance of 99-year leases, Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister Monica Mutsvangwa has said.

The exercise will also help in bringing informational records for Zimbabwe’s Agro-Ecological Zones and detect quantity of minerals, among other things.

Minister Mutsvangwa was speaking on Tuesday while briefing journalists on Cabinet deliberations.

She said Government had identified land for building industrial parks at several centres, while at least 10 000 tertiary students were set to get laptops in the next three months at affordable prices.

Minister Mutsvangwa said Cabinet had been briefed on several projects being undertaken by the Ministry of Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development on geospatial, geonautical and space capability projects.

This refers to records in a dataset providing location-related information such as geographic data in the form of coordinates, address, city, among others.

“Funding for the projects was secured and implementation is underway,” said Minister Mutsvangwa.

“They include geospatial capacity for mapping A1 and A2 farms to facilitate issuance of 99-year leases and A1 resettlement permits.

“Geospatial capacity for revision of Zimbabwe’s Agro-Ecological Zones and Geospatial capacity for detecting and quantifying minerals.”

Other projects where funding had been secured included coal-to-liquid fuels, coal-to-fertiliser, medical and industrial gases and thermal power plant at Mkwasine coalfields.

Minister Mutsvangwa said there were several strategic alliance that had been created through Public Private Partnerships for infrastructure like construction of a medical school at National University of Science and Technology.

Responding, to questions from journalists, Higher and Tertiary Education, Science and Technology Development Minister Professor Amon Murwira said they were revolutionalising higher education to be responsive to the needs of industry.

“As you would remember, we are realigning higher and tertiary education,” he said.

“Basically, our education has been focussing on teaching, research and community service. This will ordinarily not result in any goods and services.

“Our issue now is to say knowledge must cause industry, not vice versa. In this regard, we have reviewed this mission, which I would call Education 3.0 to an Education 5.0 mission, which is teaching, research, community engagement, innovation and industrialisation.

“It is in this context that we have started with the idea of industrial parks, which will be set up in many local authority areas, starting with provincial capitals where it is applicable.

“The purpose of the industrial parks are to make sure that products from the innovation hub (s) that we are setting up at all State institutions, which are then the prototype, have a place where manufacturing can take place.

“As you would remember, we are trying to make sure that the product of our education system is a productive product. It is not a person with books and papers in the head, it is a person who connects the mind with the hands for production.

“Therefore, the industrial parks are basically set up for manufacturing prototype (s) that would have been produced in our innovation hubs. This is the essence of our Education 5.0, that is education which produces goods and services and this whole philosophy is the pathway in which we can industrialise this country to make sure that we meet our expectations of vision 2030 or even exceed them.”