Introduction

Abstract

Zimbabwe began implementing the IMF recommended Economic Structural Adjustment Programme (ESAP) in 1991. School enrolments were declining, people were avoiding the numerous health facilities that had been established in 1980, infant mortality was on the increase, the country’s primary health care system was crumbling from lack of staff and essential drugs, while inflation was eating into the incomes of the Zimbabwean people in general and the low-income groups in particular. However, Zimbabwe suffered a series of droughts throughout the period under discussion. In fact the 1991-95 reform programme was, in the words of one source, ‘greeted by the most economically devastating drought ever experienced in the history of the country’, which resulted in some sectors of the economy, such as agriculture, witnessing a serious decline in productivity. It is also noted that the programme was also ‘bade farewell [sic] by a second drought in 1994/95’.2 The strain on the national economy exerted by these droughts and the droughts’ contribution to the problems facing the Zimbabwean people cannot be under-estimated.