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Janet Zhou

Zimbabwe’s Debt Dialogue: What Four Years Have and Have Not Achieved

Author: Published on: Published in: Debt and Fiscal Justice

In May 2026 the African Development Bank approved a US$4 million grant to Zimbabwe under the African Development Fund’s Transition Support Facility. The money funds the Zimbabwe Arrears Clearance Dialogue Enhancement Project, which runs for 36 months from June 2026 to May 2029. What it pays for is dialogue. The project covers advisory services, legal support, communication, diplomatic outreach, and the running of the Structured Dialogue Platform and its Sector Working Groups. A second component funds debt management systems, parliamentary oversight and anti-corruption work. A third covers project management.

President Mnangagwa asked the African Development Bank to champion Zimbabwe’s arrears clearance in 2022, and the Support for Arrears Clearance and Governance Enhancement project was approved in the same year. The Structured Dialogue Platform was launched in December 2022. When the current project closes in May 2029, the Platform will have run for six and a half years.

The roadmap and the calendar

At a roundtable held on the sidelines of the IMF and World Bank Spring Meetings in April 2025, the arrears clearance roadmap was set out in four steps. Zimbabwe would secure and implement an IMF Staff-Monitored Programme during 2025. It would develop a credible strategy to close the fiscal financing gap. It would clear its arrears with the international financial institutions by early 2026. It would then complete a comprehensive debt restructuring under the G20 Common Framework.

The Staff-Monitored Programme arrived in April 2026 rather than in 2025. The arrears to the international financial institutions have not been cleared. What has been approved instead is three further years of funded dialogue, ending in 2029.

Zimbabwe’s public debt stood at approximately US$21.5 billion at the end of 2025. Of that, US$11.7 billion was external, and about US$7.7 billion was owed to multilateral and bilateral creditors. Those are the African Development Bank’s own figures, published with the grant approval.

What the dialogue has delivered

The process has produced results, and refusing to count them would be dishonest.

The Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe has stopped its quasi-fiscal operations and the liabilities have been transferred to Treasury. This matters more than the technical language suggests, because quasi-fiscal operations were the mechanism through which the central bank spent public money outside the budget and outside parliamentary scrutiny for years. The exchange rate has moved closer to market-determined rates. Token payments have resumed to the African Development Bank, the World Bank, the European Investment Bank and all seventeen Paris Club members.

On land, the Farm Title Deed programme launched in December 2024 with a 99-year lease that is bankable and transferable. The first United States dollar cash payments to signed-up former farm owners were made on 24 March 2025, roughly two decades after the acquisitions they compensate. Government has also begun returning farms protected under Bilateral Investment Promotion and Protection Agreements. Zimbabwe abolished the death penalty in 2024.

The Staff-Monitored Programme is performing. The IMF completed its first review on 27 July 2026 and reported that Zimbabwe had met all five quantitative targets, covering the primary budget balance, net international reserves, Reserve Bank credit to the non-financial public sector, external borrowing and monetary base growth. Growth reached 8.3 per cent in 2025 and the Fund projects about 5 per cent for 2026.

One indicative target was missed. Protected social and priority spending was under-executed, with shortfalls in the Basic Education Assistance Module, the Pfumvudza/Intwasa agricultural scheme and the Social Protection Management Information System. Every target governing the fiscal aggregates was met, and the one measuring whether poor children stayed in school was not.

The African Development Bank’s engagement

The Bank has done considerably more than convene meetings, and the record should be stated accurately.

It has financed the technical capacity the process needs, paying for Global Sovereign Advisory and the legal firm Kepler-Karst to support the arrears clearance work with defined timelines. It held the process together through its own leadership transition, with Sidi Ould Tah agreeing to champion the dialogue after taking office in September 2025 and continuing to work alongside the High-Level Facilitator, former Mozambican president Joaquim Chissano.

It has also opened its own operations to inspection. MapAfrica, the Bank’s geocoding platform, publishes the location and detail of Bank-funded activities across the continent, so a citizen can see what is being financed in her own district instead of accepting a summary on trust. Transparency about the lender’s own money is the part of the transparency agenda that lenders most often skip, and the African Development Bank has not skipped it.

On 27 August 2026 the Bank held its first Civil Society Open Day in Zimbabwe, bringing 61 representatives of government, civil society, development partners and Bank staff together in Harare. The programme covered the Country Portfolio Performance Review, the Civil Society Engagement Action Plan for 2024 to 2028, and lessons from Bank-funded operations including the arrears clearance project itself. The Bank’s active Zimbabwe portfolio stood at 18 operations worth about US$166 million as of July 2026. Participants examined how civil society might engage across the project cycle and discussed routes to Bank funding, including a proposed dedicated financing mechanism for civil society organisations.

Eyerusalem Fasika, the Bank’s Country Manager for Zimbabwe, told the meeting that civil society organisations act as advocates for citizens, partners in implementation and contributors to transparency and accountability. Civil society representatives asked for more structured participation in Bank-supported programmes.

The governance pillar

Those civil society representatives made their request in a country where the law now permits the state to dissolve the organisations they work for. The dialogue rests on three reform pillars: economic growth and stability, governance, and land tenure. Creditors have acknowledged progress on the first and the third. The governance pillar is where the process has stalled, and the clearest illustration is a statute.

The Private Voluntary Organisations Amendment Act was gazetted on 11 April 2025. It imposes registration requirements on all non-governmental organisations, including community-based groups that have never handled donor money. It empowers the state to deregister organisations and seize their assets where they are deemed to be acting in a politically partisan manner. Registration is administered by an Office of the Registrar under executive control, carrying wide discretionary powers over the governance and activities of registered organisations. The term “politically partisan” is not defined by the organisations it will be used against.

Ten days after the Act was gazetted, at the April 2025 roundtable, the Bank’s then president Akinwumi Adesina described the assent as a significant setback that posed a risk to the arrears clearance and debt resolution process. Chissano, at the same meeting, listed civil society engagement, democratic elections, judicial processes, freedom of assembly and freedom of expression among the outstanding challenges.

What dialogue cannot do

Clearing arrears requires money, and the money is the part that has not moved.

Zimbabwe proposed a plan in April 2025 to secure US$2.6 billion in bridge financing to clear its arrears to the international financial institutions. By April 2026 it was approaching the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, France and Algeria for around US$2.5 billion. In June 2026 it sought a US$150 million loan from the African Development Bank towards the same purpose, which is six per cent of what is required.

No bridge financier has committed. Until one does, the Sector Working Groups can meet until 2029 without altering Zimbabwe’s standing with a single creditor. The US$4 million funds the conversation, and the financing gap that would end the conversation remains open.

Where this leaves us

Three asks follow from the record.

Publish the reform matrix, the agreed milestones and the assessments against them. The dialogue has run since December 2022 and has produced no public document allowing Zimbabweans to judge whether the commitments made in their name are being met. A process that funds a communication component can afford to communicate its own scorecard.

Use the oversight that already exists in law. Section 300(4) of the Constitution requires the Minister of Finance to report to Parliament at least twice a year on the performance of loans raised and guaranteed by the State, and section 300 requires an Act of Parliament to set borrowing limits. The Public Debt Management Act gives these duties statutory form. The arrears clearance project will spend donor money strengthening parliamentary oversight of debt, while the constitutional instruments for that oversight sit unused. Funding a capacity that exists is not the same as exercising it.

Attach a date to the bridge financing. A roadmap with three completed steps and one unfunded step is a roadmap that ends where it matters.

The African Development Bank has kept this process alive through a leadership change, paid for the advisers, opened its portfolio to public view and brought civil society into the room. Those are the Bank’s decisions and it has made them well. Whether Zimbabweans end up with cleared arrears or with conversation funded to 2029 depends on decisions taken in Harare, and on whether the creditors who named the governance condition intend to hold it.

Sources

administrator

Janet (Jay) is a pan-African feminist, a practitioner, and activist with over 15 years of experience in the civil society sector in Southern Africa. She is a transformative change influencer, and a leader experienced in conceptualizing and executing people-centered development programs in the civil society sector. She is a writer and author on economic justice focusing on the inclusion of marginalized groups and communities to influence policy change. In recognition of her brave work, Janet was recognized as the US State Secretary Anti-corruption Champion award in 2022. She has also been awarded the Director of the Year in Zimbabwe award for her impactful leadership in the CSO sector in the country. She was also named as one of the top 50 Emerging Women Leaders in 2022. She has served as the Executive Director for the Zimbabwe Coalition on Debt and Development (ZIMCODD), and as the Southern Africa People’s Solidarity Network (SAPSN) Secretary General. She is currently working for Southern Africa Trust as Country Manager Zimbabwe/ Economic Justice Lead.

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