ABSTRACT
The Province of Harare, which consists almost entirely of the City of Harare and its dormitory suburb, Chitungwiza, contained a million and a half residents in the 1992 Census. Harare and Chitungwiza together have grown at a rate of over 5% per annum since Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965 and at a rate of nearly 6% per annum since Zimbabwe’s Independence in 1980; currently, they are growing at 6-8% per annum. These growth rates and the resulting degree of urbanization are very comparable to those of other Sub-Saharan African capital cities. The municipal piped water supply is not the only water that is artificially cheap in Harare. Borehole water is free, in the private sense that, once one has invested in the drilling, there is no variable cost to removing the water. The City neither restricts the drilling of boreholes nor places meters or charges on the pumping out of groundwater.
