DEEP DIVE DATAThe catchment paradox.Same store, 7.5× the market.
A local supermarket closes. The obvious question is where the demand goes. It almost never disappears — it shifts to tuck shops, nearby formal retailers, and informal trade networks, the way it always has in Zimbabwe.
That raised a bigger question for us: how are these markets actually being measured in the first place? We mapped the households around a former store in Prospect, Harare, to find out — combining satellite imagery, GIS-based house counting, and public ZIMSTAT datasets.
People don't shop by suburb boundary
The standard approach is to use official suburb boundaries. For Prospect, that yielded 6,008 households — a number that would go straight into any conventional site-selection memo.
But people don't shop according to administrative lines. They shop according to accessibility: what they can comfortably walk, ride a kombi to, or drive to. So we remeasured the store's natural catchment — a 3km accessibility radius — instead.
Redraw the line, redefine the opportunity
Same store, same neighbourhood. Redefining the boundary made the addressable market nearly 7.5× larger.
How many market studies, site selections, and investment decisions in Zimbabwe are built on arbitrary administrative lines rather than actual human mobility? Changing the boundary doesn't change the store — it changes what the store is worth on paper.
Profiling the catchment's digital footprint
Once the natural catchment was defined, we layered in ZIMSTAT ICT access and household survey data to size more than just rooftops.
| Mobile phone owners | 109,000 |
| Smartphone owners | 93,000 |
| Mobile money users | 88,000 |
| WhatsApp users | 75,000 |
| Radio owners | 36,000 |
| TV owners (satellite) | 24,000 (16,600) |
84% of the catchment owns a smartphone. 81% already uses mobile money. This is not an underserved market — it's a digitally warm one that lost its nearest formal retail anchor.
Everyone has EcoCash. Almost nobody has a POS.
| Mobile money users per EcoCash agent | 2,466 |
| Mobile phone owners per Bank POS machine | 21,953 |
Wallet adoption is not the constraint here. Cash-in, cash-out, and card-accepting infrastructure is. A catchment can be digitally ready and still be physically starved of the last-mile points that convert intent into a transaction.
Mapping the full transaction lifecycle
- Marketing reach. Media preference, social channels, and device access — can you actually reach this household?
- Connectivity. Smartphone penetration and network density — can they receive and act on the offer?
- Purchase & liquidity. Mobile money adoption and agent accessibility — can they convert intent into cash movement?
The goal: move past "how many people live here?" to "how digitally and commercially ready is this neighbourhood?"
The boundary you choose is the opportunity you see
Draw Prospect by suburb and you undercount the market by 39,052 households. Draw it by mobility and you find a catchment that's already smartphone-literate and mobile-money-fluent — just short on physical cash points. Same geography, two completely different investment cases.
The closed store wasn't a demand problem
That's not a shrinking market. That's a market that was measured with the wrong instrument — and a liquidity bottleneck hiding behind a rooftop count. Still early work, but the spatial insights are proving fascinating.
Deep Dive Data covers Zimbabwe capital markets and financial products.