Housing cooperatives in Zimbabwe
Every stand here is someone's life savings.
Mabwe keeps the ledger. Members see what they owe. Committees can prove where the money went.
The current system of record.
The problem
Nobody here was careless.
Cooperatives run on receipt books, a spreadsheet and a WhatsApp group. It holds up fine until someone asks a question that spans four years and three treasurers.
Cash, bank deposit or mobile money. Handwritten receipt. Carbon copy stays in the book.
A new one starts. The old one goes in a cupboard. The spreadsheet gets updated when there is time.
The new treasurer inherits the books, and arrangements nobody wrote down.
"What do I still owe?" Answering means finding three books and hoping every entry was copied across.
The money is almost always fine. Proving it is the hard part.That is what Mabwe fixes.
Stand 749, from the stand itself.
The answer stops depending on who is in the office.
Every payment is recorded against a member as it is taken. The member sees the same ledger the committee sees.
- Balance outstanding
- $18,240
- Paid to date
- $36,480
- Next instalment, 1 Oct
- $500
Development progress
For cooperative committees
One administrator. Several hundred stands.
Set up the development once. Schedules, invitations, receipts and arrears all follow from it.
What disappears
Hours you stop spending.
- •Reconciling a receipt book against a spreadsheet
- •Working out by hand who is behind
- •Answering the same balance question forty times
- •Rebuilding history when a committee turns over
- •Chasing contractors for progress
What gets easier
The work a committee is actually for.
- •Selling stands without double-allocating one
- •Cash, bank and mobile money in one ledger
- •Telling three hundred members at once
- •Putting servicing out to bid
- •Showing an AGM where the money went
Servicing work, put out to bid.
Register once. Bid anywhere.
One profile gets you procurement from every cooperative on the platform. No separate relationship with each committee.
- •Bids stay sealed until closing, so your pricing is not shopped around
- •Awards and work orders are on record, with dates
- •Progress you report reaches the members paying for it
Raw land to title deed. Six stages.
The Zimbabwean pipeline as it is. A member asking where their stand has got to is asking which of these has happened.
- SurveyThe land measured and pegged.
- Subdivision permitConsent to divide it into stands.
- Development permitConsent to build the servicing.
- ServicingRoads, water, sewer, electricity.
- CertificationWork signed off by the authority.
- CessionThe stand transferred to the member.
The rules
Four things the software will not let anybody do.
Collecting the money is not the hard part. Proving what happened to it years later is.
- Members are credited in full.
- A balance drops by the full amount paid. Mabwe never holds member money. You collect through your own bank, mobile money or counter, and we bill the cooperative separately.No platform fee ever touches a member
- Payments are never deleted.
- A mistake is fixed by recording the correction, with who made it and why.
- Agreements are never rewritten.
- New terms create a new version. Both stay readable.
- Cooperatives are sealed off.
- Enforced in the database, on every read and write. One cannot see another.
Cooperatives join by arrangement.
Terms are agreed with a person. Tell us about your development and we will show you the system running on it.