Zimbabwe must not abandon its children at 18

By Lawrence Makamanzi | Aug 17, 2026 | 8 Min read

THE announcement that Zimbabwe is developing a national aftercare policy for young people leaving orphanages and children's homes deserves genuine commendation.

For too long the country has operated on a cruel and thoughtless arithmetic in which a child turns 18 on a Tuesday and is, by Wednesday, expected to have become a fully formed, self-sufficient adult with no institutional memory of what came before. The Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare ministry, through officials such as Totamirepi Tirivavi, has completed consultations in all 10 provinces, with the Harare Metropolitan engagement marking the close of that process. This is a moment that should be marked not with quiet bureaucratic satisfaction but with the recognition that Zimbabwe is finally being pushed, by the evidence of its own failures, to confront a wound it has left open for decades.

The problem the policy seeks to address is neither small nor abstract. Zimbabwe currently carries the welfare burden of more than seven million children, including over 560 000 who have lost one or both parents and thousands more who have never known a stable, permanent home.

Of the children in institutional care, only a small fraction has any formal foster placement waiting for them, which means that for the vast majority the children's home is not a temporary stop but will house them the whole of their childhood. When such a child reaches 18, the law regards them as an adult, yet the truth on the ground is far more complicated. An 18-year-old who has spent a decade or more in an institution has often never opened a bank account, never negotiated a rent agreement, never navigated a job interview and in many cases has no relative who remembers their birthday, let alone one prepared to take them in. To release such a young person onto the streets of Harare, Bulawayo, or any other town, with a suitcase and a certificate but no family, no capital and no guidance, is not empowerment. It is abandonment dressed up as maturity.

The challenges that care leavers face once they exit the system are well documented by researchers who have taken the trouble to listen to them directly. Housing is usually the first crisis, because a young person with no deposit, no guarantor and no rental history struggles to secure even a single room in a lodger's yard and many drift into informal settlements or homelessness within months of leaving care.

Employment follows the same painful pattern, since a country already struggling with joblessness offers little room for a young adult with no networks, no capital to start a small trade and often incomplete education because school fees became unaffordable once institutional support ended. Emotional and psychological strain compounds all of this.

Young people who have grown up in institutional settings frequently carry unresolved grief, a fragile sense of identity and the particular loneliness of having no one to call when things go wrong, no elder to advise them on a difficult decision and no family gathering to return to at Christmas.

Stigma adds another layer of injury, because the Zimbabwean society, for all its communal instincts, still treats a child raised in an institution with suspicion, sometimes assuming without evidence that such a background signals bad behaviour or moral failure. Girls leaving care face the added danger of exploitation, early pregnancy and transactional relationships entered into simply to secure a roof over their heads.

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Taken together, these pressures explain why so many care leavers in the region, according to recent academic studies conducted across Zimbabwe, Ghana, South Africa and Uganda, describe their transition to adulthood not as a graduation but as a fall.

It is also worth pausing on the deeper contradiction that the very existence of large children's homes represents. The residential institution, as a model of raising a child, is fundamentally a colonial and Western import. It did not exist in precolonial African society, where a child without living parents was absorbed into the extended family, raised by an aunt, a grandmother, or a village elder and never made to feel that they belonged to no one.

Zimbabwe's 2004 National Orphan Care Policy acknowledged this truth, stating plainly that institutional care should be a last resort and that placing a child in an institution should only happen after every effort to keep them within a family and community have been exhausted. That this policy has existed for over two decades and yet thousands of children still grow up inside dormitory-style institutions shows how far implementation has lagged good intention.

It is encouraging that the government has more recently begun promoting a six-tier framework that places family reunification, kinship care and foster placement ahead of institutional care, and is reportedly reducing new admissions into institutions except for the most deserving cases. This shift deserves support, not because institutions are staffed by uncaring people, but because no institution, however well run, can replicate the warmth, belonging and lifelong network that a family, even an imperfect one, provides.

The tragedy is that this indigenous wisdom had to be relearned through decades of documented harm to children, when it was always available in the practices of our grandparents.

None of this, however, is an argument against building strong facilities or supporting the children already inside them. It is an argument for making sure that as Zimbabwe moves away from institutional care at the point of entry, it does not simply abandon the young people already inside institutions at the point of exit. The new aftercare policy must, therefore, be judged by whether it treats 18 as a beginning of guided independence rather than a hard deadline for total self-reliance.

Several measures deserve serious consideration if this policy is to be more than another well-written document gathering dust in a ministry drawer. The first is extending the age of eligible support well beyond 18, following the logic that countries such as the United Kingdom have adopted, where care leavers remain entitled to a dedicated personal adviser and various forms of practical support up to the age of 25, regardless of whether they are studying, working or still finding their footing. Zimbabwe does not need to copy this system wholesale, but the underlying principle, that support should taper gradually rather than end abruptly, is one worth adopting and adapting to local capacity.

The second measure is the establishment of transitional or semi-independent housing, sometimes called halfway accommodation, where a young person leaving an institution can live with reduced but present supervision for a year or two while they build savings, complete training and learn the practical skills of running a household. Zimbabwean researchers, who have studied transitional housing pilots in the country, found that young people valued this continuity of relationships and the gentler slope into independence it offered, even as they worried about what would happen once that transitional support expired. The government should treat this concern as instructive rather than dismiss it and should build permanence and clear pathways into whatever transitional housing model it adopts, rather than simply creating another cliff edge two years later than the current one.

The third measure is the assignment of a dedicated aftercare officer or mentor to every care leaver, someone whose specific responsibility is to walk alongside that young person, help them draft a personal development plan, connect them to further education or vocational training and simply be a consistent adult presence they can call when a landlord threatens eviction or a job falls through. This single intervention, borrowed loosely from the personal adviser model used in the United Kingdom, costs relatively little compared to its potential impact, because it does not require new buildings, only trained personnel and a functioning case management system.

The fourth measure concerns economic empowerment and here Zimbabwe has an opportunity to design something genuinely suited to its own conditions rather than transplant a foreign model wholesale. Care leavers should be linked to vocational training in trades that have real demand in the local economy, such as tailoring, welding, plumbing, agriculture, and small business management, and should be given start-up grants or low-interest loans specifically ring-fenced for care leavers, similar to youth empowerment funds that already exist in fragmented form but rarely reach this particular group. Given that Zimbabwe's economy is heavily informal, training care leavers for entrepreneurship and connecting them to micro-finance may in fact be more realistic than assuming formal employment will absorb them.

The fifth measure is the deliberate rebuilding of family and community ties wherever any such ties can be traced. Social workers should be resourced and mandated to trace extended relatives long before a child turns 18, not as a box-ticking exercise but as a genuine effort at reconciliation and reintegration, because even a distant relative willing to offer occasional guidance and a place to spend a holiday can dramatically change a care leaver's sense of belonging. Where no family can be found, community elders, church networks and mentorship programmes should be organised to serve a similar function, restoring something of the indigenous safety net that institutional care displaced in the first place.

The sixth measure is psychosocial support that continues well past the age of 18, including access to counselling for the trauma and identity questions that many care leavers carry silently. This should not be a one-off exit interview but an ongoing service, since healing rarely happens on the same schedule as a person's 18 birthday.

The seventh measure is the formal inclusion of care leavers themselves in the design, monitoring and evaluation of the policy, an approach that the ministry has rightly signalled it wants to pursue by incorporating the lived experiences of young people with care backgrounds. This must not be a token consultation but a standing structure, perhaps a national care leavers network or advisory council, so that policy adjustments over the coming years are informed by those who actually live the consequences of institutional exit rather than by officials working purely from statistics.

Finally, none of these measures will matter unless they are backed by predictable, ring-fenced government funding and clear coordination between the ministries of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, the Higher and Tertiary Education, local authorities and the network of non-governmental organisations already doing valuable work in this space, such as SOS Children's Villages. A policy without a budget line is simply a statement of good wishes and Zimbabwe has produced enough of those over the years.

What makes this moment significant is that the government appears, for once, to be building the aftercare framework and the deinstitutionalisation reforms side by side rather than treating them as separate conversations. If pursued with genuine commitment, gradual implementation, and honest willingness to learn from both international experience and Zimbabwe's own indigenous practices of communal child rearing, this policy could mark a rare instance of the State actually catching up with what ordinary Zimbabweans have always known: that no child, however old the law says they are, should be made to face the world entirely alone.