MASVINGO, 5 December 2013 (IRIN) - Several thousand people in southeastern Zimbabwe's drought-prone Masvingo Province have had to leave their ancestral homes and villages in exchange for plots of undeveloped land lacking any infrastructure, in order to make way for the construction of a dam.
The Tokwe-Mukosi dam is being built by an Italian company, Salini, with funding from the Zimbabwean government, to provide irrigation to the local communal area of Chibi, which is vulnerable to recurrent food insecurity due to the area’s low rainfall. The dam will also supply water to the city of Masvingo, where severe water shortages have been experienced in recent years.
Construction began in the 1990s but stopped a decade later when Zimbabwe's economy experienced hyperinflation, and only resumed after the formation of the Government of National Unity in 2009. If successfully completed, Tokwe-Mukosi is set to become the largest inland dam in the country, with a capacity of 1.8 billion cubic meters and a flood area covering more than 9,600 hectares.
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