Building trust: How one developer in Zanzibar built investment safety into the resort’s structure

PARTNER CONTENT

When Christopher Nash arrived in Zanzibar in 2021, he was not expecting to build a village. The visit was intended as time with family, not a business venture. But Kendwa had other plans for him, and he returned to London with an idea he could not set aside.

Five years later, he is building Liyongo, a 60-villa residential development on the Zanzibari coast.

On arrival, he experienced the fascination anyone would upon seeing Kendwa Beach for the first time: its white sand, turquoise water, and a landscape drawing growing international attention. Yet he also identified something conspicuously absent from that picture.

Beachfront resorts were charging $400 a night, often walled off from the village next door, while the community that made the place worth visiting saw almost none of that revenue. The two economies existed side by side without connection: guests received a polished experience largely disconnected from the place itself, and locals lived alongside a growing tourism industry without necessarily sharing in its benefits.

Nash wanted to reverse that dynamic, to build something in which visitors genuinely learned from the place they were visiting, and in which the local community benefited from the hospitality development, rather than existing at its margins.

The main challenge was trust.

The caution wasn’t unfamiliarity with Africa, as many of the people considering the project already had capital working across the continent. It was unfamiliarity with Zanzibar in particular: a semi-autonomous jurisdiction with its own land law, distinct from mainland Tanzania, and its own set of reference points that even experienced regional investors hadn’t yet had reason to learn.

Nash knew he needed to design a model around Zanzibar itself, rather than importing a template developed elsewhere and expecting Kendwa to conform to it. Instead of trying to convince people the investment was safe, he would build that assurance into the structure itself.

That became the foundation of Liyongo: individually titled ownership, professional management as a single operation, and a legal framework Zanzibar already recognises for this category of property.

A team with deep local perspective and years of experience in the market shaped every part of the project. The villas are built from local, sustainable materials, with a local contractor already engaged, and the ownership and investment model has been crafted and adapted to the market by advisors who have worked in the area for decades.

Zanzibar’s route to foreign property ownership is not freehold land, but long-term leasehold title. Under the Condominium Act, this can be structured as a 99-year lease through renewable 33-year terms. Liyongo follows that framework: each villa is individually titled to its owner, rather than bundled into a fund or company share.

From there, professional management takes over. Each villa enters a single rental pool on handover and is operated centrally, rather than left to 60 individual owners managing bookings independently from abroad. Revenue is distributed to owners quarterly, with operations overseen by a team with decades of regional experience.

In that sense, the structure guarantees a title investors actually hold, an operation professionals actually run, and a revenue mechanism that pays out on a fixed schedule rather than on individual initiative.

However, that was only half of the mission: Liyongo needed to be made for Kendwa, with Kendwa.

Success for the investor and success for the community could not be treated as competing claims on the same capital. They needed to be the same outcome, built into the same business.

Liyongo built its relationship with the village’s Sheha – its local leader – before drawing up the architecture, using that partnership to shape its community initiatives from the outset. The result: a commitment to provide freshwater wells, school equipment and educational support for local teachers, training and employment pathways for Zanzibaris, community clean-up initiatives, and a platform for local artisans and producers to sell their own work. The project aims to build each of these solutions into the development itself, not add them alongside it as a separate goodwill programme.

Nash states the operating principle plainly: “We’re not there to enforce solutions. We’re just there to serve the local community as best we can with what they suggest.”

Liyongo is currently in what the team refers to as the Founder’s Release, with pricing finalised and published across all five villa typologies, the contractor engaged, and site preparation underway ahead of a targeted handover in Autumn 2028.

The opportunity, in Nash’s assessment, extends beyond the projected returns, though the underlying figures are sound: the team’s conservative modelling puts average annual returns at 13 to 14 percent over five years, with payback within seven and a half years, based on assumptions deliberately left unstretched.

In a market where investors, whether based on the continent or beyond it, are still determining how – and how confidently – to participate in Zanzibar’s growth, Nash’s proposition is direct: the investment succeeds when the place itself succeeds.

He believes it can be done. The task was proving it through the structure, not merely the pitch.