What this is

ZiMINDEX is an intelligence layer for everyday life in Zimbabwe. It brings together the signals that shape how people live, spend and plan — shop prices, the exchange rate, the electricity tariff, official statistics — and turns fragmented information into a clearer picture of the country and the realities of its households.

Prices are the raw material, not the product. The product is what you get when real prices meet a household, an income and a date, with the arithmetic left open to inspection.

The one rule

No figure here is invented. Every number on this site is either something we observed and recorded with a date, something published by an official source, or something you told us about your own life. Nothing is filled in to make a total look complete.

That rule does real work, and it costs us. We hold no rent figures for anywhere in Zimbabwe: rental listings cannot be collected, and the reference bands this site once carried were compiled rather than observed, so they were removed rather than dressed up. The same goes for anything presented by city. All but a handful of our price observations were collected nationally, never tied to a place — so a figure labelled with a city name would have been a national number wearing a local badge. Those pages are gone.

What is left is smaller and true. When a cost cannot be worked out, the total says it is short rather than quietly counting the gap as zero.

Currencies and rates

Zimbabwe has more than one answer to what something costs, depending on the currency and which rate you get. Official, interbank, cash and retailer rates are held separately and never treated as interchangeable, and a price always carries the currency it was observed in.

Who it is for

Households working out whether an income covers a month. People sending money home and wanting to know what it buys. Anyone negotiating a wage who needs to know what that wage means in practice. And researchers and journalists who need a figure they can cite with a date against it.

Who built it

Where the numbers come from

Prices are collected from Zimbabwean retailers. Official statistics come from ZIMSTAT, the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency. The electricity tariff is ZETDC’s published stepped tariff. Contributions from readers fill gaps that collection cannot reach.