Deep Dive: The UNDP's Resilience Fund and Zimbabwe's Development Horizon (CPD 2022-2026)

The United Nations Development Programme’s (UNDP) Zimbabwe Resilience Building Fund (ZRBF) has emerged a cornerstone of the country's efforts to shield vulnerable communities from escalating climatic and economic shocks. As Zimbabwe charts its course towards national development goals, the performance of the ZRBF—and its alignment with the ongoing UNDP Zimbabwe Country Programme Document (CPD) for 2022-2026—is under intense scrutiny, revealing significant successes alongside structural challenges that demand strategic recalibration.

Major Successes: Bouncing Back Better

Launched in 2015, the multi-donor ZRBF was designed to move beyond costly, cyclical humanitarian aid by building the absorptive, adaptive, and transformative capacities of at-risk communities. The program’s multi-sectoral approach has yielded quantifiable results:

Improved Livelihoods and Food Security: The program has demonstrably enhanced resilience for nearly a million people in targeted districts. Key metrics include:

A significant increase in the adoption of climate-smart agricultural technologies (from 70% to 96% in some reports).

An increase in the percentage of households with an acceptable food-based coping strategy index score, rising from a baseline of 38% to 69% at the end-line.

An increase in average monthly household income, showcasing a positive economic impact.

Productive Infrastructure and Water Security: ZRBF supported the establishment or repair of over 2,000 functional productive infrastructures for resilience building. This includes the revitalization and climate-proofing of irrigation schemes, which is crucial for sustained food production amidst recurrent droughts.

Empowering Local Systems: A core success has been the shift from top-down interventions to supporting existing local government structures and community-level platforms, such as Village Savings and Lending Associations (VSLAs). This fosters local ownership and ensures the sustainability of interventions, including the development and enforcement of community-driven by-laws for natural resource management.

Evidence-Based Policy: The ZRBF played an instrumental role in capacitating government departments for evidence generation, particularly through advanced training in data capturing and setting up high-frequency monitoring systems. This body of evidence is vital for developing data-driven, resilience-focused national policies and strategies.

Challenges and Critical Gaps

Despite the documented successes, the implementation of the ZRBF has faced challenges, highlighting areas for strategic improvement, particularly in light of the ambitious 2022-2026 CPD which prioritizes Resilience, Climate, and Energy.

Pace of Transformational Change: While absorptive (coping with immediate shocks) and adaptive (making incremental changes) capacities showed rapid improvement, the more profound transformative capacities—which involve fundamental, systemic changes to reduce chronic vulnerability—are inherently slower and require sustained, long-term political and economic stability, which has been intermittent in Zimbabwe.

Economic Headwinds: Persistent macro-economic instability and high inflation have consistently eroded development gains, making it challenging for households to sustain increased incomes and hampering the long-term viability of community-led enterprises established under the program.

Policy-Practice Disconnect: While the ZRBF has supported policy development and advocacy, the practical and swift operationalisation of new policies and strategies on the ground remains a challenge due to bureaucratic bottlenecks and resource constraints within line ministries.

Urban Resilience Oversight: The initial ZRBF heavily focused on rural resilience in 18 districts. The growing challenge of urban vulnerability—driven by poor service delivery, informal settlements, and climate hazards like flash floods—requires a distinct and scaled-up resilience model, an area that the latest CPD is now beginning to address, but which was a gap in the original design.

Measures for Improvement Aligned with CPD 2022-2026The next phase of resilience programming, particularly the newly launched ZRBF Phase 2 and the broader vision of the current CPD, must build on lessons learned by adopting the following measures:

1. Deepening Transformational Capacity
Measure: Shift from merely supporting livelihoods to facilitating integrated, market-oriented value chains that link smallholder farmers to larger formal markets, leveraging technology and private sector investment. This aligns with the CPD's focus on inclusive economic growth.

Action: Invest in climate-resilient, multiple water use and renewable energy infrastructure, making these investments part of a green economy strategy that creates sustainable jobs and reduces dependency on fossil fuels, directly addressing the CPD's Resilience, Climate, and Energy signature solution.

2. Strengthening Systemic Integration and Coordination

Measure: Institutionalize the use of ZRBF-generated data and analytical platforms within the Government of Zimbabwe's planning and budgeting cycles at all levels.

Action: UNDP must fully leverage its "integrator role" outlined in the CPD to ensure deliberate cross-programme synergies between resilience efforts, governance reforms, and health system strengthening (e.g., ensuring health facilities have solar power and climate-proofed water sources), maximizing collective impact.

3. Scaling Urban Resilience
Measure: Rapidly implement the Roadmap for Building Urban Resilience in Zimbabwe, focusing on developing a transferable Urban Resilience Model in selected towns.

Action: Channel investment towards strengthening local governance and public administration in urban areas for improved disaster risk reduction (DRR) planning, waste management, and inclusive, accessible service delivery, especially for marginalized groups like women, youth, and persons with disabilities, a key theme of the CPD.

4. Innovation and Financing

Measure: Actively explore and pilot innovative financing mechanisms, such as debt-for-climate swaps and leveraging public-private partnerships, to mobilize the significant "other resources" outlined in the CPD budget.

Action: Enhance the functionality of the Crisis Modifier Mechanism by linking it more closely to strengthened Early Warning Systems (EWS) to ensure timely, data-informed, and rapid financial responses that protect development gains immediately following a shock.

In conclusion, the UNDP’s Investment in Resilience Building, through the ZRBF, has successfully provided a crucial buffer against poverty and shock exposure for hundreds of thousands of rural Zimbabweans. However, meeting the ambitious targets of the 2022-2026 CPD—which prioritizes systemic change in the face of escalating crises—demands a sharper focus on transformative economic linkages, urban vulnerability, and the institutionalization of resilience capacity within the government apparatus to ensure a truly sustainable future.

Would you like to know more about the specifics of the Zimbabwe Resilience Building Fund Phase 2 (ZRBF 2), which is underway, or the targets set within the UNDP Zimbabwe CPD 2022-2026?