By 
Background and Context
Over the last decades, Zimbabwe has experienced a number of unprecedented economic, environmental and social shocks and stresses, many of which had long-lasting impacts. Poverty, food insecurity, malnutrition, and environmental degradation are serious challenges in Zimbabwe, particularly in rural areas, and this is likely to continue due to the effects of climate change. However, Zimbabwe is slowly starting to rebuild structures to lay a new foundation for sustainable development. Humanitarian interventions and transitional initiatives with long term strategies, multi-sector and multi-level approaches, context-specific analysis are now designed with flexibility and strategic partnerships to ensure communities capacities are built to enable them to deal with future shocks and stresses to address sectorial issues in areas such as food and nutrition security, health, education and water and hygiene, and livelihoods.
Within the UN system, UNDP took a leading role in guiding agencies through a series of conversations, meetings and workshops to define a strategic framework that works for the UN and GoZ to build resilience in at-risk communities. Additionally, consultations were held with international as well as national NGOs and academia for a broad perspective to be able to support the thinking and prevent at-risk communities from continuously sliding back into a situation calling for humanitarian assistance. UNDP, in close collaboration with the Ministry of Lands, Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Resettlement (MLAFWRR) and support from EU, FCDO and SIDA – embarked on laying the groundwork for a resilience-building initiative. This culminated in the setting up of the Zimbabwe Resilience Building Fund. This initiative has a strong focus on evidence-based programming and the work focuses on 3 overall sets of components;
Component 1: Building evidence to improve the policy environment and stimulate service provision to enhance household and community resilience.
Funded activities included developing evidence around the impact and vulnerabilities to shocks and climate change and build coalitions of change to influence relevant Government of Zimbabwe policies (e.g., the Food and Nutrition Policy, the National Gender Policy, the Environmental Act, the Traditional Leaders Act, the Disaster Risk Management policy, the new Social Protection Framework) and other donors. Following implementation of components 2 and 3, this component will also analyse the cost effectiveness of various interventions to build resilience and respond to shocks. In nutshell, this component will contribute to the overall resilience building and have a better understanding of what works in resilience how and why.
Component 2: Interventions to support long-term household and community resilience in the face of climate shocks and trends. Examples of interventions include (but not limited to): Community resourced disaster plans and its implementation (i.e. building small-scale community infrastructures/assets), productive safety nets for targeted groups/communities/households, value chains, market linkages, savings groups, and access to financial services including micro insurance and weather-based crop insurance – particularly for women, gender-sensitive, climate-smart agriculture techniques including post-harvest technology, climate- smart irrigation systems, drought-tolerant variety development and marketing, along with livelihoods and crop diversification. Interventions also include (participatory) action research for climate change adaptation.
Component 3: A crisis modifier that can respond to humanitarian shocks. The programme has a flexible risk financing mechanism for early warning and early action to protect development gains. The mechanism ensures that communities are able to recover quickly and minimise the loss of development investments and gains. The response includes a wide range of activities such as cash-based, time-limited and built upon existing structures where possible to reach people in time and cost effectively. Other donors used this window with their humanitarian funds, even when not a core donor to the ZRBF for instants the Danish provided funds through this mechanism to respond to an emerging crisis. This offered value for money and greater humanitarian aid coordination – in line with the EU member state position on humanitarian and resilience building and the High-Level Cash Panel – both of which call for donors to coordinate around humanitarian interventions and policy.
Based on the evidence from component 1, the programme targeted chronically vulnerable areas with high levels of poverty and/or food insecurity, where the negative effects of climate change are already manifesting themselves, and where frequent and/or multiple shocks occur. These areas often received repeated rounds of humanitarian assistance and are where climate stresses are having the greatest negative impact and longer-term approaches are required. Therefore 18 rural districts districts were targeted namely: Mudzi, Mutoko, Binga, Kariba, Mbire, Chiredzi, Mwenezi, Nyanga, Beitbridge, Lupane, Matobo, Insiza, Nkayi, Zvishavane, Mberengwa, Bubi, Umuguza and Umuzingwane
The ZRBF programme is currently in its close out phase and the 7 projects and one strategic partner funded by ZRBF has been in existence from July 2016 until June 2020, with a recent extension granted up to the end of June 2022. UNDP would like to implement a full value for money assessment (cost-benefit analysis) at ZRBF fund level and for all its 7 projects and one strategic partner.
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