April 26, 2026

Economics Department
Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe
Email:

Dear Economics Department,

Re: Formal Data Request for Academic NLP Research — NhauFinance

My name is Takudzwa Chirindo, and I am a graduate student in the M.S. Data Analytics Candidate program at George Washington University (expected May 2027). I am writing to formally request access to publicly available and internally archived textual publications from Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe for use in an academic research project.

PROJECT BACKGROUND

I am developing NhauFinance, a domain-adapted financial language model for African markets. The project involves continued pretraining of FinBERT (ProsusAI/finbert, 110M parameters) on a curated corpus of African corporate and central bank text, targeting four downstream tasks: central bank communication sentiment classification (Hawkish / Neutral / Dovish), financial distress detection, corporate event detection, and African financial named-entity recognition. The model and all benchmark test sets will be released publicly on HuggingFace (TakueGhost/NhauFinance) and GitHub (github.com/TakueGhost/NhauFinance) under an open research licence.

DATA REQUEST

I respectfully request the following materials from Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, in machine-readable format (plain text, HTML, or PDF) where available:

1. Monetary Policy Statements (all available years, including mid-term reviews)
2. Governor speeches and public addresses
3. Financial Stability Report publications
4. Monthly Economic Review publications
5. Banking Sector Report

Where possible, I request coverage from 2000 to the present. Earlier records are equally welcome and will be incorporated.

INTENDED USE

All requested materials will be used solely for academic NLP research. Documents will be tokenised, deduplicated, and used to train a text model. No raw documents will be redistributed in any form. I am happy to enter into a data use agreement, supply a formal research protocol, or provide any additional documentation upon request.

This request is made in the spirit of the Freedom of Information Act (Chapter 10:33).

Thank you for your time and for supporting academic research on African financial markets. I would be grateful for confirmation of receipt and an indication of what materials can be provided and in what timeframe.

Respectfully,

Takudzwa Chirindo
M.S. Data Analytics Candidate
George Washington University
| +1-240-351-7339
GitHub: github.com/TakueGhost | LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/takudzwa-chirindo