Mary Mundeya and Kudzai Chikiwa
MAKONI DISTRICT, Zimbabwe — The notebook is Anashe’s (name changed for ethical reasons) secret archive of a dream that only lasted one school term.
Its pages, filled with notes on English grammar and a carefully drawn map of Africa, are all that remain of her time with DREAMS.
From 2016, the DREAMS program was a lifeline for thousands of adolescent girls and young women in Zimbabwe.
Funded by international donors like the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), it provided a comprehensive package of HIV prevention, health services, and empowerment programs. It was designed to protect the most vulnerable people from infection, early marriage and school dropout.
For 17-year-old Anashe, it was the difference between a bright future and faded hope.
Rescued from a violent marriage, she entered at 15, in exchange for ten sacks of maize, she was identified by community workers and brought into the DREAMS fold. The program didn’t just offer her health services; it re-enrolled her in school, covering her fees, uniform, and books.
A small monthly stipend for her family replaced the “lost labour” she represented, securing their reluctant permission for her to return to school.
“For the first time, I could sleep without fear,” Anashe recalls, her voice a hesitant whisper.
“DREAMS gave me back my life. I thought I was finally free.”
Today, that freedom is a memory.
The donor funding that powered DREAMS and countless other social initiatives has vanished.
For the first time since independence in 1980, Zimbabwe is experiencing a national budget process without the heavy donor backing that long underpinned its social programs. The abrupt scaling back of programs like DREAMS has left a vacuum, and into it, Anashe has fallen.
In March 2025, the Trump administration announced its intention to permanently dissolve USAID, with remaining operations absorbed by the State Department. This move was part of a broader effort to cut U.S. foreign aid, including a 90-day freeze on all foreign assistance, which was extended for an additional 30 days.
As a result, programs like DREAMS were halted across all 10 participating countries, including Zimbabwe.
She is now back with the husband she fled, but the abuse is worse.
He resents her brief freedom, her time in a classroom and the confidence she briefly gained.
The beatings, she says, are more frequent and more brutal.
The lifeline that pulled her to safety has snapped, and the current has dragged her back into deeper and dangerous waters.
“He tells me I shamed him by leaving,” she says, her eyes fixed on the dusty floor of her hut.
“Now, he says I must never look up again.”
Anashe’s story is the human consequence of a historic and unprecedented shift. She is one of thousands of Zimbabweans whose fragile safety nets have been yanked away, exposing the systemic vulnerabilities of a nation that relied on external aid to weave its social fabric.
Her journey from a child bride to a DREAMS beneficiary and back to a victim traces the path of a collapsing system—a stark illustration that in this new era, the most vulnerable are being left to fend for themselves on the fraying edge of survival.
The Invisible Daughter
GWERU, Zimbabwe — If Anashe’s story is one of successful rescue attempt that has been undone, then 16-year-old Chiedza’s (name changed for ethical reasons) is one of a rescue that never stood a chance. Her world is measured in centimetres—the distance she can drag herself across the dirt floor of her grandmothers’ hut.
Chiedza was born with cerebral palsy, a condition that has left her with limited control of her limbs. She is unable to speak.
She communicates through a language of gestures and sounds that only her aging grandmother (Gogo), can fully understand. Gogo, whose own body is weary from decades of labour, is Chiedza’s sole caretaker, her translator, and her only connection to a world that has systematically ignored her.
Their profound poverty makes them dependent on a nephew who brings them occasional food supplies.
This dependency, which a recent parliamentary report on Gender-Based Violence identified as a key driver of exploitation, has become Chiedza’s nightmare. The nephew abuses her, knowing her disability makes her vulnerable and her silence makes her safe.
Gogo is too frail to stop him, trapped by the terrible calculus of survival: protest and starve, or comply, endure and live.
The parliamentary report, which also references the National Disability Policy, specifically highlighted the crisis facing “women with disabilities,” noting they face increased risks while having even less access to services. For Chiedza, this isn’t an abstract finding, it’s her daily reality.
The path to safety outlined in the report is a fantasy in her situation. The nearest haven is the Gweru One-Stop Centre (OSC), a facility the report notes has assisted persons with disabilities but is hampered by “inadequate disability facilities.”
But Chiedza cannot even get to the door to encounter those inadequacies.
A critical finding was that shelters and OSCs “lacked service vehicles to transport survivors.”
For a girl who cannot walk or be transported without a vehicle, this is an absolute barrier. The report observes that victims were “forced to board public transportation which they could not afford”. But for Chiedza, there is a cruel irony, she can’t board public transport even if she had the money.
Even if a miracle delivered her to the centre, the system lacks the resources to help her. The same funding crisis that ended Anashe’s DREAMS program means there are no speech therapists, no assistive communication devices, and no specialised counsellors who could help a non-verbal survivor testify.
“We know the Chiedzas of this province exist,” says a social worker at the Gweru OSC, her voice heavy with frustration.
“But without vehicles to reach them and without the specialised resources to serve them, they remain statistics we cannot even count.”
So Chiedza remains on her mat, her body both a prison and a crime scene.
The comprehensive legislation and national strategies praised in the parliamentary report mean nothing in the silence of her hut. She represents the most brutal consequence of the funding crisis: not just the reversal of progress, but the absolute impossibility of it ever beginning for those with the most complex needs.
Her story is not one of a lifeline cut, but of a lifeline that was never woven strong enough to reach her in the first place. As the national debate focuses on fiscal transitions, Chiedza’s silent suffering is the loudest possible indictment of a system failing its most vulnerable.
The evidence — A system stretched beyond its means
The tragedies of Anashe and Chiedza are not isolated incidents of misfortune.
They are the direct, predictable outcome of a national budget struggling to fill a void created by decades of dependency and compounded by internal fiscal mismanagement, despite government assurances.
The Promise vs The Practice
The government’s official position, as stated in the 2025 Budget Strategy Paper, is clear: “To cushion the vulnerable groups… funding is required for the priority areas in social protection, education, health, agriculture/food security and climate change.”
This rhetorical commitment, however, crumbles under the weight of the numbers and historical context.
Civil society watchdogs like Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD) have long argued that “donor financing historically masked domestic underinvestment” in critical social sectors. While the government is a signatory to international benchmarks like the Abuja Declaration (15% of budget to health) and the Dakar Framework (20% to education), actual allocations have consistently fallen short. This created a system that depended on external crutches now being pulled away.
According to budget analyses by ZIMCODD, even with nominal increases, social spending fails to meet these targets. The 2025 public expenditure ceiling saw a dramatic nominal increase, but civil society argues this is swallowed by inflation and does not translate into real protection for the vulnerable.
“Inadequate healthcare financing, corruption and tenderpreneurship, more spending on salaries than on service delivery…” ZIMCODD noted in a February 2024 report, identifying the structural weaknesses that prevent allocated funds from reaching the women and children who need them most.
A budget as a “weapon of mass destruction”
The credibility of the budget process itself is under scrutiny. Leading economic analyst Professor Gift Mugano has been a vocal critic, once describing the 2025 national budget as “a weapon of mass destruction,” suggesting its devastating consequences for ordinary citizens. His criticism points to a deeper malaise in fiscal governance.
Professor Mugano has highlighted chronic “discrepancies in budget disbursements,” noting that “some ministries are yet to receive the full amounts they were allocated… while others had been given more than their allocations.”
This erratic funding flow creates a chaotic environment where ministries responsible for social services cannot plan, while others, like the Ministry of Transport which reportedly surpassed its 2024 allocation by 245% in six months, absorb resources needed elsewhere.
The Donor Dependency Hangover
The core of the crisis is now fully exposed. For decades, donor funding acted as a stealth subsidy for Zimbabwe’s social sector, allowing the treasury to direct its domestic revenues elsewhere.
This is starkly visible in the Gender-Based Violence (GBV) sector. The recent Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Women’s Affairs report found that a staggering 80% of the funding for GBV programming came from development partners. With the government covering only about 10% of the estimated USD $80 million annual GBV budget, the state-owned Anti-Domestic Violence Council is described as “crippled” by a lack of resources.
The same committee documented the consequences: safe shelters from Bubi to Marange lack service vehicles, have broken boreholes, and cannot pay their staff. At the Epworth One-Stop Centre, employees have left because development partners stopped funding their salaries. This is the granular reality of the fiscal transition, not just a line item in a budget, but a shelter without a vehicle to transport a survivor like Chiedza to a clinic.
A Fragile Stabilization and the PFM Promise
The Treasury’s 2025 Mid-Term Budget Review highlights macroeconomic gains, noting that “the local currency component of M3 also increased by 19.8%,” evidence of successful monetary stabilisation. Yet this stability is precarious. The same document warns of persistent fiscal pressures, including the high cost of grain imports and public wages.
Here, Professor Mugano’s analysis of the government’s approach to salaries is telling: “It is a Catch 22 situation. The minister wants to be generous by raising salaries but at the same time raise inflation rate.”
This dilemma directly impacts social spending, as a larger wage bill competes for the same limited funds meant for social protection and services.
The government emphasises Public Financial Management (PFM) reforms as the path to efficiency. But for the manager of the Gweru shelter, who has to choose which survivor to turn away, or for Anashe, who was returned to her abuser when a program lost its funding, these reforms are an abstract concept for a future that is too late. Their lives are testimony to the brutal lag between policy intention and practical delivery, highlighting that a budget’s true priority is not what it promises, but what it pays for.
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