By Tanatsiwa Dambuza
For fifteen years, Sekai Munemo (53) has watched different convoys visit. She was among the thousands resettled in Hatcliffe in 2005, in the wake of Operation Murambatsvina, meaning “Restore Order” but often translated as “Clear the Filth” or “Move the Rubbish.” Launched on May 19, 2005, the government-led campaign saw police and military units bulldoze and burn tens of thousands of homes and informal businesses. In its sweep, approximately 700,000 people lost their homes, while more than 2 million others suffered indirect effects through the destruction of livelihoods and communities. Since then, she has counted more than forty corporate and church handovers in her neighborhood: sacks of maize meal in winter, blankets in June, and school shoes in January. Each convoy arrives from the northern suburbs of the city, photographs itself with the recipients, and departs before lunch.
The shoes rarely fit. The maize meal sometimes arrives at homes that have no firewood to cook it. The photographs of recipients holding the goods are posted online and attached to news stories. The convoys go home with headlines and front-page stories. But what about the communities left behind?
“They do not ask us what we really need,” Ms Munemo said. “They bring what they have. They ask us to smile, then photograph us with it. They go back to where they came from. The next month, a different group arrives with the same thing.”
The convoy traveling from north to south is the dominant form of corporate philanthropy in Harare today. Women’s clubs and corporate volunteer programs from Avondale, Borrowdale, and Mount Pleasant congregations organize weekly outreach trips to Hatcliffe, Caledonia, Hopley, and Mbare. The amounts, taken individually, are modest. Taken in aggregate, the Harare private and faith sectors spend meaningful sums on these activities each year.
Almost none of these convoys return to the communities; most programmes are one-time events. Almost none of it is co-designed with the receiving community. Almost none of it is evaluated for impact. The only document most of these donations are answerable to is the donor company’s own internal communications brief, which is often the marketing plan that sets out how the firm wants to be seen. In other words, the success of the giving is judged by how it makes the company look, not by whether it changed anything for the recipients.
The model rewards visibility over outcomes. Banners get hung. Photographs get taken. The cheque is theatrically oversized so that it photographs well. The newspaper is briefed. The recipient is asked to smile. The reputational benefit is captured, and underlying problems return the morning after.
At a children’s shelter in central Harare, Brighton Mudondo (22), recalled the Christmas of 2018, when he was fourteen and three weeks off the street. A retail bank had organised a handover at the shelter. He was given a clean shirt and asked to pose nicely and happily. His photograph appeared in the newspaper the following day.
“They came at Christmas,” he said. “They gave us food and a small bag each. The man in the suit shook our hands, and honestly, I thought he would come back because he was so friendly and accommodating, but I never saw him again. Some of us ended up going back to the streets, as the model adopted by these corporations is not sustainable and does not help us in a way that equips us with skills that make us self-sufficient.”
Normally, after distributing the handouts to one community, the Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) budget moves on to a different constituency. That is the culture and trend in the business world in Zimbabwe. It’s more about brand visibility than giving back to the community.
In the gap between shelter, family, and school, dozens of children like him cycle back to where they began. A patchwork of Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in Harare runs drop-in centres, feeding programmes, drives to donate sanitary products, and rehabilitation work for street-connected children. The recurring failure, according to those who run these programmes, is the handover. Each step in the process – the move from street to shelter, from shelter to family, from family to school – has a different funder. None of them funds the bridge between the steps. That is, the slow, unglamorous work that holds each transition together: trauma counseling before a child leaves the street, tracing and mediating with family to return the child home, the fees and catch-up lessons needed to reintegrate a child in school, and follow-up visits to stop the placement from collapsing. None of it photographs well, so none of it is funded. So, the child’s well-being falls through the gap along with the budget.
A CSR consultant who has advised both corporations and NGOs in Harare over the past decade, across the banking, telecommunications, and retail sectors—and who asked not to be named to protect ongoing relationships—described the pattern from inside the partnership. The first conversation, she said, almost always goes well. A senior executive identifies a cause that aligns with the firm’s communications strategy, and they agree on the numbers. The trouble starts in the second year when the executive who championed the programme is transferred or replaced. The new executive wants a programme of their own, with their own branding; hence, the original commitment lapses. This situation leaves the community holding an asset, half-finished or unmaintained, that the firm has no budget or willingness to complete.
She pointed to the broader pattern in the public record. A 2024 parliamentary report by the Thematic Committee on Indigenisation and Empowerment found that of the over 60 Community Share Ownership Trusts established between 2011 and 2013, the majority are now dormant. Their development projects have been stalled, and their governing boards are now inactive. It is important to note that the trusts were a legal entitlement, not a charitable gesture; mining firms were to allocate 10 per cent of their shareholding to their host communities. The Marange-Zimunya trust was promised $50 million in seed capital by three mining firms, but received only $550,000. The Mhondoro-Ngezi-Chegutu trust, 11 years after the 2011 commitment, had to take Zimplats, the country’s largest platinum producer, to the High Court to enforce the agreement.
“What we see in Harare in miniature, the country has seen at scale in the mining sector,” she said. “In place of the shares they were owed, the communities have been treated as subjects of corporate social responsibility. The check has served as a consolation prize for the structural commitment the company failed to deliver.”
The CSR consultant is careful to note exceptions. Two of the most successful Harare partnerships she has advised were with firms that ringfenced corporate social responsibility budgets at the board level rather than at the marketing level and protected those budgets across leadership changes. Both ran for more than five years, and both produced measurable outcomes. However, she said, those examples are the minority.
“The firms that have done corporate social responsibility well have done it without making it about themselves,” she said. “The firms that have done it badly have done it because their communications department asked them to.”
Dr Levious Chiukira, a lecturer at Midlands State University, who has been studying corporate engagement with urban communities since the early 2010s, framed the problem in geographical terms. Harare’s charity
flow, he said, reproduces the spatial logic of the colonial city. The wealth sits in the north, in the low-density suburbs that historically housed only white populations during the colonial period. The need sits in the south, in the high-density, working-class suburbs that were also once segregated by race. “The support goes north to south,” Dr Chiukira said. “It is a vicious cycle.”
Published research supports this observation. An article by Irvine Langton, Joseph Zuva, and Chengedzai Mafini found that CSR in Zimbabwe has led the private sector to be viewed as a public-relations exercise rather than a development partnership.
A few miles from Hatcliffe and a different city away from the Avondale boardrooms where the convoys are organised, a different form of philanthropy is at work in Mbare Musika, the country’s largest informal market complex.
Mai Chido (58) has cooked sadza, beans and stew at her stall in the market for thirty years. Her customers are the vendors, traders, kombi crews, and street children who pass through every day. Most pay for what they eat. But there are a few she has come to know—a handful of street children and one or two of the older vendors who have fallen on hard times—whom she does not charge. She keeps no ledger of who owes her what, and she will not turn away a hungry child she knows for arriving without money.
“There is a boy who has been eating here for four years,” she said. “He has never paid me, and honestly, I have never asked him because I also have a daughter at home. If she were hungry and far from me, I would hope someone like me would feed her.” She offered a popular Shona proverb, “Kandiro kanoenda kunobva kamwe”, meaning “One good turn deserves another”. Giving to others ensures that when you are in need, help will be returned to you.
Over three decades, Mai Chido has fed thousands of people who could not pay. Her annual losses from this practice run into several thousand United States dollars. No NGO funds her work. Neither corporate sponsor has approached her, nor has the newspaper photographed her, except when the police are chasing her for her informal station. She would not call herself a philanthropist, nor would the development sector. In Harare today, that title seems reserved for those who can afford to be photographed.
Back at her stall in Mbare Musika, the boy who pays occasionally always arrives just before noon. She serves him a plate of sadza and beans, then turns to the next customer.
She is asked what she would say to the next group of donors arriving in the township near her market. She would not ask them for money and seems puzzled that anyone would expect her to. Mai Chido is more concerned with whether the convoys consult the communities they visit before arriving, rather than bringing the same things over and over again and then departing with the photographs.
“Ask,” she said. “Then ask again.”