Integrated Financing for Renewable Energy in Zimbabwe: A Convergent Mixed-Methods Assessment of Policy Support, Institutional Barriers, and Investment Drivers

Abstract: Zimbabwe possesses an amazing variety of energy resources in the form of solar, wind, and biomass, but the amount of renewable energy investment and deployment is still quite low overall. The primary objective of this research is to assess the impact of different factors such as policy support, institutional capacity, accessibility to finance, and collaboration among stakeholders on the investment in renewable energy in Zimbabwe. The paper also intends to show how the contextual risk factors affect the decision of the investor. A convergent parallel mixed-methods (hybrid analytics) approach was used to combine quantitative and qualitative evidence. The quantitative data was gathered via a structured survey which was given to 100 people involved in the energy sector and the data was analyzed using the SPSS v28 program, employing descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and standard multiple regression techniques. The qualitative data was obtained from 15 semi-structured expert interviews and then analyzed thematically using NVivo in order to support and enrich the statistical findings. The major outcomes of the investigation show that (i) policy support is the only predictor of renewable energy investment likelihood that has been found to be statistically significant (β = 0.321, p = 0.002), the decisive role of policy credibility is being emphasized; (ii) financial accessibility is regarded as critically low despite the fact that there is a relatively high level of collaboration among stakeholders, hence there are persistent constraints that are associated with currency instability, guarantees, and investor risk perception; and finally (iii) the fragmentation of institutions and the ambiguity of regulations are the reasons for the ineffectiveness of the existing financial mechanisms.