Zimbabwe’s real-estate awards honour a developer, recycler and football treasurer
by BERNARD CHIKETO
ON MAY 30th, at a ceremony in the capital, Beauty Dorothy Hughes was named an innovative entrepreneur in housing schemes and community development at the Zimbabwe Women in Real Estate & Construction Awards.
The honour might have confused anyone who thinks property developers spend their days only in hard hats.
Hughes unclogs gunk in car engines; turns scrap metal, tyres and car parts into furniture and art; she serves as treasurer of a Premier League football club; and she founded a Lions Club in her home town of Mutare.
Somehow, she also builds houses.
Hughes began her career in property in 2000 and acquired what she calls “a considerable knowledge of the property market”.
Starting as Regional Controller for KMP International, she supervised housing projects in five towns—Mutare, Marondera, Gweru, Kwekwe and Masvingo.
A stint as a negotiator at Hollands Estate Agents followed in 2010, after which she registered her own firm, Zim-Properties Realty Developers, in 2012.
Since then, her company has partnered with Zimbabwe Housing and Prudential Housing to develop several suburban schemes: Hillview, Weirmouth Glen and Lot 32 Weirmouth, as well as the Mushamukadzi project in Mutare.
Building homes, though, was never the limit of her ambition.
From 2020 she expanded into environmental management, recycling scrap into household items and picking up arts-and-innovation awards from the Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce and the Zimbabwe Integrated Traders Association.
ZimTrade now invites her regularly to exhibit her crafts.
She trained under the Next She Exporter programme and with Chenhaka Trust’s Arts Management and Business Project and has displayed her work at venues ranging from the SADC Summit to the Women’s Summit.
Of late, she has also started an initiative she calls Zero Carbon, Green Engines Solutions, aimed at tackling a problem that is as unglamorous as it is pervasive: carbon build-up in vehicle engines.
Incomplete fuel combustion leaves deposits that quietly choke an engine’s efficiency, raising toxic emissions and draining wallets through higher fuel consumption.
So, her venture is twofold.
First, she actively detect and clear carbon deposits from engines, restoring efficiency and cutting emissions well before new exhaust after-treatment is needed.
Second, she aims to educate car owners that a cleaner engine is not an environmental luxury but a cost-saving measure.
Her community commitments add an eccentric twist to the resume.
Hughes is the treasurer of CAPS United, a top-flight football side, and the founder and adviser of the Mutare Speciality Lions Club.
Hughes is also supporting Zimbabwe Prisons and Correctional Services with who she has been working with by training inmates in crafts for free for the last two years as part of their rehabilitation.
Her education is as varied: a Graduate Diploma in Marketing from the Institute of Commercial Management in London, diplomas in business administration and management from the London Chamber of Commerce and Industry, plus a certificate in modern management from the Zimbabwe Institute of Public Administration and Management.
At 47, she is married to a web-author husband who builds her company sites, and they have two sons.
The award jury singled out her “extensive experience and dedication to property development”, but Hughes herself offers a simpler explanation for her durability in a tough market.
“I have a tenacious approach and an ability to match my clients to their ideal properties,” she says.
That tenacity now extends well beyond floor plans.
In a sector long dominated by men, Hughes’s career suggests that a woman who collects tyres, trophies and townhouses can carve out a space of her own.
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