Zimbabwe’s Children Are Ready. Is the Policy?

In Kadoma district last some years back, a thirteen-year-old girl named Chido went back to school after three difficult weeks away. Her community’s borehole had dried up during a prolonged dry spell, and like many girls in rural Zimbabwe, she had taken on the daily walk to find water. But when a rehabilitation programme restored the borehole, she returned to class, sat her Grade Seven examinations, and passed. She is now in secondary school.

Chido’s story does not end in despair. But it raises a question worth sitting with: what would have been possible sooner, and for how many more children, if the systems around her had been built with her in mind from the start?

Zimbabwe faces real climate pressures. The ND-GAIN Country Index places it among the world’s more climate-vulnerable nations. The World Bank estimates that climate-related shocks have cost the country an average of 2.6% of GDP annually over the past decade. Cyclones Idai (2019) and Ana (2022) displaced over 260,000 people, with UNICEF noting that children made up more than half of those affected. The 2023–2024 El Niño drought, one of the most severe in recent memory, pushed 5.7 million Zimbabweans into acute food insecurity according to WFP, with ZimVAC recording child malnutrition rates above 25% in Matabeleland South and Masvingo.

These are not reasons for despair. They are reasons to act, and Zimbabwe has more tools, more community energy, and more international goodwill available to it right now than at any previous moment in its climate response history.

Children Bear the Most and Stand to Gain the Most

It is well established that climate change does not affect everyone equally, and among the most affected are children. Nutrition, education, and mental health are all sensitive to environmental disruption in ways that compound over a lifetime. A UNICEF Zimbabwe survey found that 27.6% of children under five were stunted nationally as of 2022, a figure shaped in part by climate-induced food insecurity. School dropout rates in the Limpopo basin communities tracked by Save the Children rose 34% following the 2021–2022 mid-season drought, with girls disproportionately affected. The Lancet documented in 2021 that children in high climate-risk settings are twice as likely to experience chronic anxiety as peers in more stable environments.

• Unpacking environmental laws for real estate in Zimbabwe
• Veld fire management strategies for 2022
• Unpacking environmental laws for real estate in Zimbabwe
• Veld fire management strategies for 2022

The flip side of this vulnerability is potential. When climate adaptation is designed with children in mind their nutrition, their schooling, their safety, their participation the returns are disproportionately large. A well-nourished child earns an estimated 10–17% more over a lifetime than a stunted peer, according to WHO economic modelling. A girl who stays in secondary school is more likely to delay marriage, earn income, and invest in the next generation. The case for child-centred climate policy is, at its core, an investment argument.

Zimbabwe’s Vision 2030 framework explicitly ties national prosperity to human capital development. UNICEF reported a 41% rise in child waterborne disease admissions across Manicaland and Masvingo during the 2023–2024 drought, a reminder that preventable illness consumes healthcare budgets that could otherwise fund immunisation and adolescent health services. Climate adaptation investment in boreholes, drought-resilient food systems, early warning infrastructure costs far less than treating the consequences. The arithmetic is straightforward.

General Comment No. 26: A Ready-Made Roadmap

In August 2023, the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child adopted General Comment No. 26 on children’s rights and the environment. It is the most detailed guidance yet on what child-centred climate governance looks like in practice. Zimbabwe ratified the Convention on the Rights of the Child in 1990, which means this framework is not foreign. It is an elaboration of commitments Zimbabwe has already made.

General Comment No. 26 recognises that children experience climate change differently from adults they are more physically vulnerable, they have longer futures at stake, and they currently have limited formal channels to influence the decisions that will shape those futures. The Comment asks states to integrate child rights into climate policies, conduct child-centred climate risk assessments, guarantee climate education, create legal remedies for environmental harm, ensure children participate meaningfully in climate decision-making, and align budgets with child adaptation needs.

Zimbabwe’s Constitution already provides strong foundations. Section 73 protects every person’s right to an environment not harmful to their health or wellbeing. Section 81 articulates children’s rights comprehensively. What an alignment with General Comment No. 26 would offer is the legislative and programmatic architecture to bring those constitutional provisions to life in the Children’s Act, the Environmental Management Act, the National Climate Policy, and the next Nationally Determined Contribution submitted to the UNFCCC.

The good news is that Zimbabwe does not need to start from scratch. The constitutional architecture is there. Civil society and youth organisations have already done substantial preparatory work. What is needed is political commitment to connect the dots and the returns on doing so are considerable.

A child-rights-consistent climate framework would open doors to the Green Climate Fund, the Adaptation Fund, and bilateral partners whose funding criteria increasingly require rights-based approaches. UNICEF, the Global Partnership for Education, and the European Union have all indicated that child climate protection frameworks are eligibility factors for programme co-financing. Rwanda’s integration of child nutrition and climate adaptation into a unified social protection system contributed to a 54% reduction in child stunting between 2005 and 2020. Ethiopia’s Productive Safety Net Programme attracted over USD 4 billion in international co-financing since 2005, partly because it could demonstrate measurable child welfare outcomes during climate shocks. These are accessible precedents, not distant aspirations.

Young People Are Already Leading

One of the most encouraging features of Zimbabwe’s climate story is the energy young people are bringing to it. They are not passive recipients of climate impacts. They are advocates, monitors, community educators, and law reformers who have been building the case for a child-centred response long before it became government priority.

The Zimbabwe Youth Climate Coalition has engaged Parliament directly on the social protection gaps in the current NDC. Youth delegates from across Zimbabwe’s provinces participated in the 2024 National Children’s Forum, where the Harare Communiqué called on government to develop a standalone Child Climate Action Plan anchored in General Comment No. 26. Civil society coalitions with strong youth leadership have submitted memoranda to the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Environment, Climate and Tourism, calling for age-disaggregated provisions in the proposed Climate Change Bill. These are substantive policy contributions, not symbolic gestures.

The argument young people are making is a simple one: if climate risk is a known and quantifiable threat to child development, then climate legislation that does not disaggregate its protections by age is leaving something important on the table. The government would be wise to treat this energy as an asset rather than background noise.

RNCYPT: Proof That Child-Centred Climate Models Work

The Regional Network of Children and Young People Trust (RNCYPT), supported by Terre des Hommes (TDH), has spent several years developing and testing child-centred programming models in Zimbabwe that are directly relevant to climate adaptation. What makes these models worth attention is not that they are experimental it is that they work, and they work at low cost.

In Kadoma, RNCYPT’s Community-Led Monitoring (CLM) approach has trained adolescent girls and young women (AGYW) to serve as data collectors and community accountability agents, originally within health service delivery. The same participatory architecture has been extended to environmental monitoring: trained adolescent volunteers now track borehole water levels, report crop stress indicators, and flag early drought signals. The model has been running in two wards and has already fed evidence into a district-level resource management dialogues with the local authority. Young people moved data into decision-making rooms where it previously did not exist.

The RNCYPT model is replicable. Community-led monitoring requires trained volunteers, structured data tools, and a functioning feedback loop to duty-bearers no extraordinary technology, no large budget. The advocacy pathway model needs political will at district level, which becomes available when national policy provides the mandate. What RNCYPT has shown at community scale, a government-led effort with civil society and international partners could expand nationally. The proof of concept already exists.

Steps That Would Make a Difference

Domesticating General Comment No. 26 does not require Zimbabwe to build new architecture from nothing. It means aligning existing laws and policies with obligations the country already holds. A few targeted steps would make a substantial difference:

• Updating the Children’s Act to recognise children’s right to a safe environment and establish accessible remedies for climate harm, drawing on the existing constitutional protections in Sections 73 and 81.
• Incorporating child rights impact assessments into environmental planning under the Environmental Management Act, so that infrastructure, land use, and disaster risk decisions routinely consider age-disaggregated vulnerability.
• Formalising child and youth participation in the NDC review process, including structured pathways for children’s forums to contribute to the technical working groups at the Ministry of Environment, Climate, Tourism and Hospitality Industry.
• Dedicating a defined share of the national climate adaptation budget to child-specific interventions nutrition, WASH, education continuity, and psychosocial support in climate-stressed communities with transparent public reporting.
• Formally recognising and expanding community-led monitoring models like those developed by RNCYPT, integrating participatory youth surveillance into national early warning systems for climate-related child vulnerability.

What Zimbabwe Stands to Gain

A government that can demonstrate a child-centred, rights-consistent climate governance framework will be better placed to access the Green Climate Fund’s USD 40 billion adaptation window, the Loss and Damage Fund operationalised at COP28, and bilateral climate finance from the EU, the UK, and Nordic partners, many of whom have made child climate protection an explicit eligibility consideration. The moral case and the financial case point in the same direction.

Beyond financing, a country that invests in child climate resilience now is building the human capital base that Vision 2030 requires. A healthier, better-educated young generation is a more productive workforce, a more innovative economy, and a more stable society. Protecting children from climate harm is not a welfare expenditure. It is infrastructure investment with a multi-decade return.

Chido is in secondary school now. She did not need the government to rescue her. She needed the system around her to hold. When it did when the borehole worked, when the school was accessible she did the rest herself.

That is the promise of child-centred climate policy. Not heroic rescue. Just systems that hold. Zimbabwe has 7.2 million children under fifteen who are ready to do their part. The question is whether the policy environment will be built to support them.

Parliament has an opportunity to pass a climate law with explicit child rights provisions. The Ministry of Environment has an opportunity to include children’s organisations in the NDC revision. Treasury has an opportunity to ring-fence child adaptation funding and report against it publicly. The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has an opportunity to make climate literacy part of every child’s schooling.

General Comment No. 26 is not a burden. It is a guide. Zimbabwe has the constitutional foundations, the civil society capacity, the youth energy, and the community models to act on it. The path from aspiration to implementation is shorter than it might appear.

Invest in Zimbabwe’s children. The returns will outlast any single policy cycle and they will be felt by the generation that will run this country long after the current one is gone.