• This Strategic Plan is an economic risk management document rather than a purely public health strategy, designed to address health threats through cross-sectoral collaboration
• The plan identifies major structural gaps in coordination, surveillance infrastructure, funding, and research, with its entire five-year implementation budget of only USD 9.2 million
• Without a legally mandated coordinating body and a ring-fenced national budget line, the plan risks remaining another technically sound but under-resourced strategy

Harare- The COVID-19 pandemic pushed Zimbabwe’s economy into a 6.2% contraction in 2020, expanded the number of citizens in extreme poverty by 1.3 million, pushing the national extreme poverty rate to 49%, while nearly 500,000 households lost at least one income earner as markets closed and remittances fell. All of this was triggered by a zoonotic pathogen that crossed the species barrier far from Zimbabwe’s borders and reached a global population with no immunity and no coordinated surveillance system capable of stopping it before it became a pandemic.

IMF modelling in 2021 projected that COVID-19 could cause a cumulative USD 22 trillion gap in global GDP by 2025 relative to pre-pandemic forecasts, with disproportionate impacts on low- and middle-income countries. Actual data shows the gap narrowed faster than expected as growth resumed.

Zimbabwe is precisely the kind of economy those IMF models warned about: a low-middle-income country with an agricultural sector employing the majority of its rural population, a wildlife estate among the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, a national cattle herd whose trade and movement connects to every province, and a health system whose per-capita government spending was USD 50 in the most recent budget year, less than the cost of a single day's care in the private hospital that the Medical Services Amendment Act now requires to admit emergency patients regardless of ability to pay.

And that base is eroding. Government health spending as a share of the budget fell from 12.87% in 2021 to 9.82% in 2024, moving further from the 15% Abuja target. Per-capita government spending dropped to a low of US$28.19 in 2023. The WHO minimum for low-income countries is US$86. The One Health Plan asks for US$9.2 million over five years. That is 0.23% of one year’s health budget. Hence, the plan is credible, but the envelope it sits in is not.

That economic context is the frame within which the Zimbabwe National One Health Strategic Plan 2026 to 2030, developed under the leadership of the Public Health Advisory Department in the Office of the President and Cabinet and co-signed by three cabinet ministers, must be understood. In actual fact, it is not a public health document written for epidemiologists, but an economic risk management document whose subject matter happens to be disease, and whose failure to be implemented would cost Zimbabwe orders of magnitude more than its total implementation budget of approximately USD 9.2 million across five years.

The One Health approach recognises the interconnectedness of human, animal, plant, and environmental health and emphasises collaboration across those sectors to address complex health challenges. 70% of emerging infectious diseases in humans originate from animals, and the COVID-19 pandemic demonstrated with catastrophic clarity what that statistic means in practice, a virus that likely originated at a human-animal interface produced the largest economic contraction in Zimbabwe's recorded modern history, overwhelmed a health system already operating at USD 50 per capita, and eliminated poverty reduction gains that had taken a decade to accumulate.

The Quadripartite Agreement between WHO, FAO, WOAH, and UNEP is the international architecture to which Zimbabwe's plan explicitly aligns, and that alignment matters because it determines Zimbabwe's access to technical support, funding partnerships, and the early warning networks whose intelligence is what actually stops an outbreak before it becomes an epidemic.

A 2024 baseline assessment of Zimbabwe's One Health landscape, conducted by the University of Zimbabwe's Capacitating One Health in Eastern and Southern Africa programme, found that One Health implementation was proceeding with minimal coordination across sectors, with the One Health Secretariat established in 2022 focused almost entirely on antimicrobial resistance rather than the broader cross-sectoral mandate the approach requires. The assessment identified four structural gaps whose honesty is the most analytically useful feature of the plan's opening sections.

The first is coordination. Zimbabwe has no legally mandated coordinating body with the authority to enforce cross-sectoral collaboration across the Ministry of Health and Child Care, the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development, and the Ministry of Environment, Climate and Wildlife. Without that legal mandate, the plan's five pillars rest on voluntary inter-ministerial cooperation whose durability across budget cycles, cabinet reshuffles, and competing policy priorities is the most significant implementation risk in the entire framework. The plan commits to drafting a One Health policy and reviewing existing legislation to identify gaps and overlaps, but the legislation review is a USD 16,500 budgeted activity whose timeline runs to 2030, meaning the legal foundation for the coordination the plan requires will not exist until the plan's final year at the earliest.

The second is infrastructure. Zimbabwe's surveillance systems are fragmented, with limited integration and insufficient coverage in rural areas. The Central Veterinary Laboratory and the National Microbiology Reference Laboratory exist and function, but their capability is constrained by inadequate equipment, consumable shortages, and skilled personnel deficits that delay outbreak identification and containment. The gap between detecting a disease event and confirming its nature in a laboratory is the window during which transmission spreads undetected.

Zimbabwe also lacks sufficient quarantine facilities at ports of entry, an omission that the SADC region's cross-border livestock and wildlife movement makes commercially and epidemiologically significant simultaneously. The plan specifically identifies weak wildlife health monitoring as a risk factor in a country where national parks and protected areas function as reservoirs for zoonotic diseases, meaning the absence of systematic disease tracking in wildlife creates the conditions for exactly the kind of spillover event whose containment failure produces a national health emergency.

The distribution system is the other constraint. MCAZ did reach WHO Maturity Level 3 in 2024, and registration times fell, but NatPharm, the state distributor, is owed about US$21 million by public facilities. That has cut procurement and left essential medicines availability at 55%. Local manufacturing covers less than 30% of needs. In an outbreak you can detect in the lab but still fail to move reagents, animal vaccines or treatments because the distributor has no cash.

Staffing is uneven too. Doctor vacancies collapsed from 25% in 2021 to 1% in 2025. But pharmacist vacancies rose to 33% and laboratory scientist vacancies are still at 22%. The NHS 2026-2030 targets nearly quadrupling workforce spending per capita to US$32. Until that money appears, the technical staff who run surveillance and diagnostics will keep leaving. An interoperable data system needs operators. Right now 1 in 5 lab posts are empty.

The third is funding. There is no specific budget allocation for One Health initiatives within the government's current fiscal framework. The plan's entire five-year implementation budget across all five pillars, all 14 strategies, and all specific activities amounts to approximately USD 9.2 million. The largest budget line is USD 3.6 million for increasing infrastructural capacity for surveillance activities. The interoperable information management system that would allow human health, animal health, plant health, and environmental data to flow between ministries in real time is budgeted at USD 1.16 million. Against Zimbabwe's annual health budget of approximately USD 800 million, a USD 9.2 million five-year One Health implementation budget is 0.23% of a single year's health spending. The plan is technically credible. The funding architecture behind it is not yet commensurate with the risk it is designed to manage.

The fourth is research. Zimbabwe lacks the integrated baseline studies across human, animal, plant, and environmental health that would allow policymakers to quantify the burden of zoonotic diseases, antimicrobial resistance, and climate-related health impacts on the economy. That evidence gap is the reason One Health initiatives compete unsuccessfully for government budget allocations, the economic case for preventive surveillance, the USD 1 spent on detection that prevents the USD 100 spent on outbreak response, cannot be made without the baseline data that would confirm the investment return. USD 455,006 is budgeted for integrating indigenous knowledge systems into One Health research and USD 84,250 for a dedicated One Health research repository, the inputs that generate the evidence that justifies the investment.

Of all the threats the plan addresses, antimicrobial resistance is the one whose consequences are already measurable in Zimbabwe's hospitals and clinics rather than in a future risk scenario. AMR develops when bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites change over time and no longer respond to medicines, making infections harder to treat and increasing the risk of disease spread, severe illness, and death. The pathway through which Zimbabwe's agricultural sector contributes to AMR is direct and under-regulated.

Antibiotics used in livestock production create selection pressure for resistant bacteria whose transfer from animals to humans occurs through food consumption, environmental contamination, and direct contact. Zimbabwe's communal farming system keeps livestock in close proximity to human habitation across the country's rural provinces, providing the conditions for that transfer at every level of the value chain from farm to market to consumer.

The same antibiotics whose availability without prescription at growth point pharmacies treats human infections without diagnostic confirmation compounds the resistance pressure at the human health level. AMR is the accumulation of present prescribing and farming practices whose consequence is a healthcare system that will increasingly face infections it cannot treat with the medicines it has access to.

Climate change's role in One Health is not peripheral. It determines the geographic range of disease vectors, the mosquitoes carrying malaria, the ticks carrying tick-borne fever, the freshwater snails carrying schistosomiasis, whose movement into new altitudes and latitudes follows temperature change regardless of any government's health policy.

Zimbabwe's Meteorological Services Department has documented the increasing frequency and severity of drought events whose impact on food systems, livestock condition, and water availability creates the nutritional stress and ecosystem disruption that amplifies disease transmission at the community level. The El Niño event of 2023/24, whose impact on Zimbabwe's cereal harvest produced the food security emergency that the government's 2025 bumper harvest has partially reversed, also affected livestock condition, communal water sources, and wildlife-human interface dynamics in ways that the current siloed ministerial structure, human health in one ministry, animal health in another, environment in a third, is structurally incapable of monitoring as a unified system.

The plan identifies 14 existing legal instruments that collectively support Zimbabwe's One Health framework, from the Public Health Act and the Animal Health Act to the Environmental Management Act, the Food and Food Standards Act, and the Plant Pests and Diseases Act.

The challenge is that 14 laws administered by three separate ministries with overlapping mandates, varying enforcement capacities, and no single coordinating authority creates exactly the siloed implementation structure that the 2024 baseline assessment identified as the primary operational constraint.

When a livestock disease emerges at the interface of communal farming and wildlife in a district bordering a national park, the Ministry of Agriculture's veterinary officers, the Parks and Wildlife Management Authority's rangers, and the district health team's environmental health technicians all have mandated roles. Without a legally mandated coordination mechanism that brings those three actors to the same table within a defined timeframe and with a unified response protocol, the response is determined by which ministry reaches the situation first, whose budget covers the diagnostic tests required, and whose communications infrastructure reaches the national level fastest.

The plan confirms that most One Health activities are heavily reliant on external donors and development partners, which jeopardises their long-term sustainability and scalability. Therefore, a health surveillance system whose operation depends on external funding will be suspended when that funding ends, is interrupted, or is redirected to a more acute global priority, as COVID-19 demonstrated when it absorbed the donor resources that had been supporting routine disease surveillance programmes across sub-Saharan Africa. The plan's Pillar 3 specifically targets the establishment of a dedicated national budget line for One Health, but that budget line advocacy activity carries a budget of USD 2,100, a figure that communicates the political difficulty of the ask rather than the magnitude of the need.

The risk is no longer hypothetical. According to National Health Accounts 2021-2024, external partners put about US$500 million a year into Zimbabwe’s health sector from 2021 to 2023. By 2025 that had fallen to US$219 million. USAID funding dropped to zero. That is a 55% contraction in five years, concentrated in Global Fund, USAID and CDC. A surveillance system built on that money will be paused the moment a grant cycle ends.

The investment case for One Health in Zimbabwe does not require sophisticated modelling. The World Bank estimates that just six zoonotic disease outbreaks between 1997 and 2009 led to a global economic loss of USD 80 billion. Zimbabwe's 2020 COVID-19 experience, a 6.2% GDP contraction, 1.3 million additional people pushed into extreme poverty, and a health system stressed beyond its operational capacity, establishes the national cost of pandemic unpreparedness at a scale that dwarfs the USD 9.2 million five-year implementation budget by a factor of several hundred.

The argument for funding One Health in Zimbabwe is not humanitarian but  fiscal. The cost of the surveillance system that catches the next outbreak before it spreads is a fraction of the cost of the outbreak that goes undetected until it is already a national emergency.

Vice President Mohadi described the strategy as transformative, positioning health at the centre of sustainable development and the country's journey toward upper-middle-income status by 2030. Zimbabwe's Vision 2030 aspiration requires a health system whose performance matches a USD 8,300 per capita income economy. The country's current health spending of USD 50 per capita is the baseline from which that aspiration must be built.

One Health is therefore, not the totality of that journey, but the surveillance and prevention architecture that stops future pandemics from destroying the economic progress that funds the health system improvement that sustains the upper-middle-income aspiration. The plan that three ministers signed is technically sound, internationally aligned, and honest about the gaps it exists to close.

There is also a signal in what is not funded. Donor money has protected HIV, TB and malaria but non-communicable diseases have not. The last national risk-factor survey was in 2005. Only 2% of facilities have a full range of diagnostic tests. The NHS flags ECG machines and colposcopes as under-supplied. If the pending NHPP Bill pools funding and creates a national equipment line, that is where manufacturers and insurers will find demand, even as the public system struggles with basics.

In the end it comes down to two things that aren’t written in the strategy. Cabinet must pass a law that forces Health, Agriculture, and Environment to work together with real authority. And Treasury must ring-fence money for One Health, so it isn’t waiting on the next donor grant. Get those two right and the surveillance systems, labs, and data platforms can follow. Get them wrong and this joins the pile of technically sound plans that never got resourced.

As of now, we’re still waiting on both.

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