Zimbabwe will have to rely on taxes to plug a large gap left by Donald Trump’s foreign aid cuts, Finance Minister Mthuli Ncube says.
In a series of executive orders after his inauguration as US president, Donald Trump withdrew his country from the World Health Organisation and announced a 90-day freeze on all foreign aid, pending an assessment of whether programmes align with his “America first” agenda.
At the end of 2023, the US had programmes worth over $300 million running in Zimbabwe, according to data on the USAID foreign aid portal. The money is channelled through NGOs and not via the national budget.
The country gets over $200 million each year from America’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which includes support for health workers’ wages and other funding for HIV prevention.
“We are talking about $200 million or so (on PEPFAR) that is at stake. Our response really should be domestic resource mobilisation, which is what we have been doing,” Ncube told media from Davos, where he is attending the World Economic Forum.
By “domestic resource mobilisation”, he is referring to a slate of unpopular taxes he has introduced. These include a tax on sugar content in drinks, plus a 1% tax recently introduced on fast food. Already, Zimbabweans pay an AIDS levy, and “sin taxes” on beer, also targeted at healthcare, Ncube says.
“All these taxes form the base that we can use to build resource mobilisation to support our health needs. It has to be really through this kind of thinking that we raise resources to support health domestically as foreign funding is under threat,” Ncube says.
WHO estimates that over half of Zimbabwe’s health spending is externally financed. Zimbabwe expects $461 million from donors for health programmes this year, up from $353 million in 2024.
Government has been poor at funding public healthcare. In 2025, Zimbabwe will allocate only 2.1% of GDP to health, down from 4% in 2024. What little is given to health is often disbursed late. Treasury’s 2024 mid-year data showed that only 27% of the health ministry’s allocated funds had been used by June.
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