Policy paper

UK–Zimbabwe development partnership summary, July 2023

Published 17 July 2023

Introduction

The Strategy for International Development (IDS) places development at the heart of the UK’s foreign policy. It sets out a new approach to development, anchored in patient, long-term partnerships tailored to the needs of the countries we work with, built on mutual accountability and transparency. This approach goes beyond aid and brings the combined power of the UK’s global economic, scientific, security and diplomatic strengths to our development partnerships. Our 4 priorities are to deliver honest, reliable investment, provide women and girls with the freedom they need to succeed, step up our life-saving humanitarian work, and take forward our work on climate change, nature, and global health. The Integrated Review Refresh (IR23) reiterates that sustainable development is central to UK foreign policy and sets out how the UK will go further and faster on development to reduce poverty and reinvigorate progress towards the SDGs. This Country Development Partnership Summary details how the IDS and IR23 will be put into practice with Zimbabwe.

Country context

The UK and Zimbabwe share a long and complex history which has resulted in deep people-to-people links. Today, an estimated 12,000 to 15,000 British nationals live in Zimbabwe, whilst over 112,000 Zimbabweans live in the UK. Zimbabwe’s large UK-based diaspora (the second largest after South Africa) is a significant source of remittances, equivalent to more than 1% of Zimbabwe’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Zimbabwe is also the third largest provider of health and social care workers to the UK.

There is significant UK public and parliamentary interest in human rights, governance, and development in the country. Zimbabwe remains a UK Government priority country on human rights, with targeted sanctions against 5 individuals for human rights violations and corruption, as well as restrictions on Zimbabwe Defence Industries and on the trade of arms and military goods. UK sanctions are not intended to affect trade and investment, which both countries want to increase.

In the 2 decades following Independence (1980), Zimbabwe made strong development progress. However, significant economic management and governance challenges, combined with high climate vulnerability, undermined this progress and reversed many development gains. Now, despite Zimbabwe’s relatively high levels of human capital (adult literacy rate is 86%), key human development indicators are some of the lowest in the region:

• 42% live in extreme poverty in 2022 (up from 23% in 2011)
• almost a quarter of the 16 million population is food insecure
• 39% of women aged 15 to 49 have experienced violence
• the health service is under severe pressure, leading to a significant rise in health worker migration

These economic, governance, and development challenges are exacerbated by the fact that Zimbabwe has not repaid its debts to the multilateral development banks and many bilateral partners which means they cannot access the highly concessional lending offered to most developing countries, hampering much-needed investment in infrastructure and other sectors. This Government of Zimbabwe (GoZ) credit risk, together with currency instability and a challenging business environment has also limited honest, reliable, foreign direct investment (FDI), with investment increasingly coming from China and primarily focused on extractive industries. This makes bilateral development support and investment from countries like the UK particularly important. It also makes clearing arrears and returning to concessional lending a top development priority for the GoZ.

Zimbabwe’s overall development priorities are informed by the 2021 to 2025 National Development Strategy (NDS1) (PDF, 15.2 MB) – a 5-year plan which focuses on achieving upper middle-income status by 2030. It places particular emphasis on achieving macroeconomic stability, on the SDG theme of leaving no-one behind, and on re-engagement with the international community.

Why and how: the UK’s development offer with Zimbabwe

The UK is committed to supporting Zimbabwe on its path to long-term, inclusive, and resilient development, democracy, and prosperity. Our development partnership requires patient, sustained diplomacy, policy dialogue, and targeted programmatic support, combined with greater trade and investment. We recognise the potentially transformative impact of arrears clearance on access to concessional and international finance for Zimbabwe. GoZ and the international community, including the UK, are working to establish a clear framework for measuring the necessary progress on critical economic and governance reforms.

All UK support is aligned with GoZ’s National Development Strategy. Given the levels of extreme poverty, we prioritise engagement and support which reduces poverty, builds resilience, and catalyses prosperity. The UK’s development offer in Zimbabwe addresses all priorities in the UK’s IDS as set out below.

Empowering women and girls

This priority cuts across much of the UK’s policy engagement and programming in Zimbabwe (see below). All our engagement includes a focus on gender equality and 55% of all bilateral funds will support women and girls over the next 2 years. Improving girls’ education remains a top priority, where our objective is to increase the number of girls accessing 12 years of quality education. The UK has supported the education sector in Zimbabwe for over a decade and is now the only bilateral donor. We are encouraging GoZ to meet its commitment to spend 20% of its budget on quality education. Over the last 5 years, more than 190,000 children have been supported to get a decent education, nearly 1,000 young mothers were supported to re-enter education after giving birth, and nearly 145,000 secondary school children have received psychosocial emotional support – a need which has increased since the COVID-19 pandemic. British Council supports school leadership training and an average of 12 master’s students a year receive Chevening scholarships.

We are also working to increase global understanding of how to effectively tackle gender-based violence (GBV) through our innovative programming in Zimbabwe. In collaboration with the World Food Programme (WFP), and in support of GoZ objectives on GBV, we have developed a new approach to preventing and responding to GBV that combines economic empowerment with household wellbeing, to reduce the stress and drivers of conflict within a household. We will use this evidence to influence United Nations (UN) agencies to adopt GBV interventions in their global programmes and international policy.

Promoting global health

Zimbabwe’s health system is under severe stress, through lack of capital investment and a chronic shortage of skilled health workers, standing at just a third of the World Health Organization (WHO) recommended levels. The UK remains a longstanding partner in the health sector, encouraging GoZ to increase investment in the sector.

In the last decade, the UK has supported:

• 1.3 million women and children under the age of 5 to access improved nutrition
• 810,000 women and babies safely through pregnancy and early childhood
• 500,000 women to access family planning

Our focus in the next 2 years will be to support 2 million women and babies to access essential maternal and neo-natal healthcare, whilst supporting GoZ to prepare for future epidemics and pandemics. UK support for health is delivered via a pooled fund with the European Union (EU) and Ireland in partnership with the Ministry of Health and Child Care. We work closely with the Global Fund and other key bilateral partners (notably the US) to ensure our support is complementary and focuses on joint priority areas, such as health worker training and retention and domestic financing. The Fleming Fund is helping improve antimicrobial use through better data. A UK private sector company, NMS Infrastructure, is building 5 district hospitals and 30 high quality health centres.

Responding to humanitarian needs whilst building the resilience to climate change

The UK has consistently been one of the leading humanitarian donors to Zimbabwe. We are currently providing cash transfers to more than 10,000 of the most food insecure Zimbabweans. In recent years, we have been supporting a shift away from emergency response to strengthening long-term resilience. Since 2015, the UK has provided over 1 million Zimbabweans with the skills to adapt to extreme weather such as through growing drought-resistant crops. In the next 2 years, we will support GoZ’s plans to set up the National Resilience Platform. This aims to harness the collective experience and lessons learned of government ministries, development partners and the private sector to identify the best interventions to build long-term resilience of the poorest communities and boost agricultural productivity, seeking to break the cycle of humanitarian response.

Tackling climate change and protecting biodiversity

Our work on climate adaptation is complemented by a focus on supporting the GoZ’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions whilst increasing access to energy. Zimbabwe enjoys an average of 3,000 hours of sunshine a year, making greater adoption of solar technology a smart investment. In the past year, we have used solar mini-grids to power homes, businesses, health centres, and water supply facilities for 77,000 people. We are now installing solar panels in 150 schools, benefitting 250,000 children in Zimbabwe’s poorest communities. Our work in communities is matched by technical assistance to GoZ to produce a new framework for renewable energy investment, significantly increasing international interest in power producer licenses including from UK investors. We will also support efforts to improve environmental governance, with a focus on the mining sector, and support Zimbabwe to preserve its exceptional biodiversity particularly in the Kavango-Zambezi conservation area through the UK Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra).

Delivering honest reliable investment

Improving the business environment and increasing British trade and investment is essential to our development partnership as it drives economic growth, creates jobs, and reduces poverty. Through UK experts from His Majesty’s Treasury (HMT) and His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs (HMRC), we provide peer-to-peer support to bodies like the Zimbabwe Revenue Authority and the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe to help strengthen the business environment. We have provided long-term support to the Ministry of Finance to strengthen public financial management, audit, procurement, and accountancy functions, helping make public spending more efficient and accountable to ordinary citizens. The British Council supports development of the creative industry. A key priority in the next 2 years will be to increase investment from UK development finance institutions such as British International Investment (BII), the Private Infrastructure Development Group (PIDG), and AgDevCo. As well as a focus on development finance, the UK is committed to improving trade and investment between the UK and Zimbabwe. Zimbabwean companies enjoy duty-free and quota-free access to the UK, which is critical for producers in areas such as horticulture. We are working to increase UK private sector investment in renewables, agriculture, fintech, and critical minerals.

All our development engagement is underpinned by a longstanding commitment to support governance, human rights, and accountability. Zimbabwe’s international governance indices are among some of the lowest in the world. As part of the arrears clearance dialogue, the UK is committed to working with Zimbabwe on priority governance reforms, focused on freedoms of expression and association, due legal process, and peaceful and credible elections. Progress in these areas will also be important for Commonwealth re-entry and sanctions lifting. The UK supports civil society on a wide range of governance issues to which GoZ has committed, such as expanding the provision of basic documentation, supporting electoral reforms, and the expansion of paralegal networks to increase access to justice. In the next 2 years, our programmes will support 100,000 Zimbabweans to receive their basic documentation (such as ID cards), allowing them to access public services. The UK has also supported human right defenders and GBV support networks. We will expand our support to women-led organisations and networks, anti-corruption, and environmental governance.

Who we work with

The UK development approach in Zimbabwe places a premium on co-ordination to ensure we: align behind GoZ’s National Development Strategy; ensure coherence between development, trade, and foreign policy objectives; maximise the impact of scarce resources; and, avoid duplication. We co-ordinate closely with all bilateral and multilateral partners through monthly meetings of the Zimbabwe Development Partners Forum, fortnightly meetings of related Ambassadors, and quarterly meetings with the Ministry of Finance. The other major bilateral development partners in Zimbabwe are the US, the EU, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. We meet regularly with emerging partners.

Given limited resources from bilateral donors and lack of grants and loans from the multilateral development banks, resources from the global funds (Global Partnership for Education, Global Fund for Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, and GAVI – the vaccine alliance) are particularly important. The UK is a major donor to all these funds. We prioritise collaboration with these funds to ensure a collective approach to policy engagement and programme implementation and alignment with GoZ strategy. We also proactively engage the UK centrally managed programmes and other Official Development Assistance (ODA) spending departments to ensure maximum coherence and impact (see below).

Key programmes

No ODA goes directly through GoZ systems. While we work collaboratively with GoZ, the UK implements our programmes through multilateral organisations, notably the UN, Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) and the private sector. Our programmes increasingly focus on catalysing systemic changes in the sectors we support. Key programmes are summarised below.

Programme	Description	Timeframe and spend
Teacher Effectiveness and Equitable Access Children	Supports 4,500 of the poorest primary schools through school improvement grants, teacher development, and textbooks.	2019 to 2025, £39.8 million
Zimbabwe Girls Secondary Education	Supports 57,000 marginalised girls to attend and complete their secondary education.	2012 to 2023, £39.6 million
Health Resilience Fund in Zimbabwe	Strengthens the public health system with a focus on maternal, infant, child, and reproductive health as well as epidemic and pandemic preparedness.	2021 to 2025, £25 million
Zimbabwe Accountability and Citizen Engagement	Supports human rights promotion and defence, improved environmental governance, access to documentation for all citizens, anti-corruption and transparency, and women-led organisations.	2023 to 2027, £22 million
Climate Adaptation Water and Energy Infrastructure Programme	Funds construction of climate-resilient water and solar energy infrastructure in rural communities to improve productivity and livelihoods.	2019 to 2026, £16 million
Stopping Abuse and Female Exploitation	Provides services for survivors of GBV, including child marriage and modern slavery, while also working with women and men to change attitudes to GBV.	2019 to 2024, £7.3 million

All 9 of our current programmes are marked as being principally or significantly focused on promoting gender equality. Seven out of 9 programmes are marked as being principally or significantly focused on disability inclusion.

We proactively work to secure additional funding from FCDO’s centrally managed programmes and other government departments. There is a diverse range of central programmes ranging from landmine clearance to disaster risk insurance and tackling antimicrobial resistance – all of which support wider development strategy objectives. We also proactively work with other government departments notably: Defra on biodiversity; HMT on strengthening measures to combat illicit financial flows and HMRC on taxation; Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) on research and development; and, Home Office on returns.

Financial information

Initial allocations have been set internally to deliver the priorities set out in the International Development Strategy (May 2022) and the Integrated Review Refresh 2023, based on the FCDO’s Spending Review 2021 settlement.

The department’s spending plans for the period 2022 to 2023 to 2024 to 2025 have been revisited to ensure HM Government continues to spend around 0.5% of Gross National Income (GNI) on ODA. This was in the context of the significant and unexpected costs incurred to support the people of Ukraine and Afghanistan escape oppression and conflict and find refuge in the UK, and others seeking asylum. The Government provided additional resources of £1 billion in 2022 to 2023 and £1.5 billion in 2023 to 2024 to help meet these unanticipated costs. The Government remains committed to returning ODA spending to 0.7% of GNI when the fiscal situation allows, in line with the approach confirmed by the House of Commons in July 2021.

The country development partnership summaries include the breakdown of programme budgets allocated to individual countries for 2023 to 2024 and 2024 to 2025. These allocations are indicative and subject to revision as, by its nature, the department’s work is dynamic. Programme allocations are continually reviewed to respond to changing global needs, including humanitarian crises, fluctuations in GNI and other ODA allocation decisions.

It should be noted that these figures do not reflect the full range of UK ODA spending in these individual countries as they do not include spend delivered via core contributions to multilateral organisations, or regional programmes delivered by the FCDO’s central departments. Other UK Government departments also spend a large amount of ODA overseas. Details of ODA spent by other UK government departments can be found in their annual report and accounts and the Statistics for International Development.

FCDO Zimbabwe ODA allocation

Allocated ODA budget financial year 2023 to 2024	Indicative ODA budget financial year 2024 to 2025
£29.5 million	£31 million

Figure 1. 2023 to 2024 budget by sectors, total £29.5 million: women and girls, £15.5 million; climate and nature, £4.7 million; global health, £3 million; governance, £3 million; humanitarian, £2.5 million; investment, £0.8 million

Figure 2. 3-year budget trends for global health, women and girls, climate and nature, investment, and governance.