Last week I wrote about the nurse in Manchester who wires her sister’s school fees to Harare every month. Look closer at what her money buys. School fees. A grandmother’s blood pressure tablets. Crèche fees so a cousin can keep her market stall. The wire is care financing. Multiply it across an estimated five million Zimbabweans abroad and the diaspora is running an invisible ministry of health, education and childcare, funding one household at a time what the state has failed to deliver for all.

Now look at the numbers underneath. The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe recorded US$2.45 billion in diaspora remittances in 2025, up 15% on the previous year. The African Development Bank estimates the true annual flow at US$3.5 billion. Sit with that gap. Roughly a billion dollars a year reaches Zimbabwe through buses, couriers, travelling relatives and informal agents, because the people sending it do not trust the formal system to treat their money fairly. The gap between the official figure and the real one is the trust deficit, measured in hard currency.

Zimbabwe keeps asking its diaspora to send more. The better question is what would make the diaspora willing to build more. Here is one answer.

A care fund the diaspora controls

Call it the Diaspora Care Infrastructure Fund. Three words define it: voluntary, matched, ring-fenced.

Voluntary: contributors opt in, adding a chosen percentage on top of their family transfers. The family money stays untouched. Matched: for every diaspora dollar, the government adds at least one more. Ring-fenced: an Act of Parliament establishes the fund outside the Consolidated Revenue Fund, as section 302 of the Constitution permits, so the money can only build what the statute says it builds. Clinics. Early childhood development centres. School classrooms. Boreholes and piped water.

Why care infrastructure? Because this is where remittances and public failure already meet. When a clinic is two hours away, a woman loses a day of income taking a sick child there. When water is a three-kilometre walk, girls carry it before school. When there is no crèche, a grandmother’s labour replaces one. Zimbabwean women absorb the cost of every missing piece of public infrastructure in unpaid hours. A borehole, a local clinic and an ECD centre return those hours. Care infrastructure converts remittances from monthly coping into permanent capacity.

And the diaspora governs it. Contributors elect representatives to the fund’s oversight board. Diaspora associations propose and vote on projects. Every disbursement, contract and completion certificate is published. The diaspora seat extends from the fund into national budget consultations, because people financing public infrastructure have earned a voice in fiscal decisions.

Mexico already ran this experiment

This model has a track record. Mexico’s 3×1 Programme, launched nationally in 2002, matched every dollar that migrant hometown associations sent with a dollar each from federal, state and municipal government. Migrants proposed the projects. Migrants sat on the validation committees that approved them. Between 2003 and 2019 the programme funded over 29,000 community projects: water systems, sewers, electricity, roads, clinics, schools and scholarships. Independent evaluation found participating municipalities gained measurably better household access to water, sanitation and drainage. Migrant money, matched and governed jointly, built care infrastructure at scale.

Mexico also shows exactly where this model breaks, and Zimbabwe should study the fractures as closely as the successes. Three stand out.

First, the poorest places lost out. The programme funded whoever organised, so towns with strong migrant clubs abroad got projects while poorer municipalities with fewer emigrants got nothing, deepening inequality between them. Zimbabwe’s fund needs an equity floor: a guaranteed share of matched resources for low-remittance districts, so Binga benefits alongside Bulawayo.

Second, politics captured the allocations. Researchers found municipalities aligned with Mexico’s governing party were significantly more likely to receive funds. Zimbabwe’s history of partisan distribution of public resources makes this the fund’s biggest risk. The answer is structural: an oversight board where diaspora and community representatives outnumber government appointees, allocation criteria fixed in the statute, and full publication of every award.

Third, the programme died by budget line. After 17 years and 29,000 projects, Mexico’s government simply excluded it from the 2020 budget. A presidential decision erased an institution. This is why Zimbabwe’s fund must live in an Act of Parliament with its own revenue stream, so that dismantling it requires Parliament to act in daylight rather than a minister deleting a budget line.

What would make Zimbabweans abroad trust it

Start with honesty about the money itself. These are wages, earned abroad, taxed abroad, then tolled again by transfer fees averaging 8.78% across sub-Saharan corridors. Any hint of compulsion, any percentage skimmed by decree, kills the idea and drives another billion dollars into the informal channels. Voluntariness is the foundation, and everything else is built on it.

Then honesty about obligations. Sections 75 and 76 of the Constitution place the duty to provide education and healthcare on the state. The fund supplements that duty. The statute should say so explicitly, with the government match and the section 298 principles of transparency and accountability written into its core. A fund that lets the Treasury retreat from health and education spending would betray both the diaspora and the Constitution.

The evidence says diaspora capital follows credibility. Nigeria’s 2017 diaspora bond was oversubscribed because the terms were clear and the state made itself answerable to bondholders. Ethiopia and Ghana watched their bond attempts fail because trust was absent. Zimbabweans abroad already vote on the government’s credibility every month, a billion dollars at a time, through the channels they choose. A transparent, diaspora-governed fund gives them a reason to vote differently.

Even a modest start moves real money. One percent of US$3.5 billion is US$35 million a year. Matched, that is US$70 million annually for clinics, classrooms, crèches and water, chosen and audited by the people who paid for them, visible in the villages their senders come from.

Last week I argued that African states should govern diaspora money as power and answer to it as such. This is what answering looks like in practice. Zimbabwe’s diaspora has spent two decades proving it will finance care. The state’s move is to build the institution that lets five million people do it together, watch every dollar, and take their seat at the budget table their money has already paid for.