Accountability Lab Zimbabwe Annual Report 2025
Vision, Mission and Values
Director’s Overview of 2025
It is my privilege to present our account of the year 2025, a year that tested the resolve of our people, our institution, the accountability ecosystem, and the broader development sector. That we can tell this story at all is itself a testament to the tenacity of our people, our partners, and the communities we serve.
2025 was a year of profound transition. The funding landscape shifted dramatically and without warning. While our context monitoring and scenario planning had anticipated change, we underestimated its speed and scale. The abrupt suspension and eventual termination of US foreign assistance, along with the closure of USAID, affected our programmes, financial position, and capacity to retain our highly skilled human capital. Successive signals from other donors suggest the story of the shrinking development purse is far from over, necessitating that we rethink our funding and sustainability models.
Closer home, the shrinking civic space, including enactment of the Private Voluntary Organizations (PVO) Act and its influence on the independence, regulation and governance of the non-profit sector are issues of concern. While we have complied with all the administrative procedures for registration, there is no guarantee we will be registered, and the post-registration compliance requirements remain unclear. We have not allowed the pending registration process to derail our programming, but we are definitely cautious, consciously and subconsciously.
The Constitutional amendment scrapping presidential elections and extending the tenure of office for the President and other elected representatives is before Parliament, and public consultations are underway as we prepare this report. The above policy developments produced immediate, tangible consequences for the organization, the communities we serve, and individuals at the heart of our work, contributing to a climate of deep fear and uncertainty.
Yet within that turbulence, we were able to do so much with so little. As we entered 2025, we had curated an amazing close out process for our flagship New Narratives for Accountability in Zimbabwe (NNAZ) project, which we had implemented since April 2020. The close-out processes became almost impossible to implement following the withdrawal of US support.
Thanks to support from the Embassy of Switzerland to Zimbabwe, we were able to honor commitments to our partners, authorities, the communities that had trusted us, and the values that define how Accountability Lab operates. We engaged state and non-state actors to inform them that the project had ended, staged exit meetings in NNAZ implementation communities, and allowed alumni to lead their own close-out processes in creative and innovative ways. An independent end-of-project evaluation affirmed that accountability work rooted in community, sustained through relationships, and animated by creativity outlives outcomes that outlast any single project.
I want to thank the ALZ Team for its resilience and dedication. I also want to extend special and heartfelt thanks to Dr. McDonald Lewanika, who served as Country Director throughout this period and now leads Accountability Lab East and Southern Africa (ALESA). The story told in these pages is one in which he was the principal architect. I am honored to serve as its narrator and to carry forward the institutional culture he helped to build. My thanks also go to the colleagues who have moved with him to ALESA. It is their dedication and commitment throughout 2025 that made all of this possible.
Progress, we have learned, endures beyond projects. And the journey toward accountability, dignity, and justice for all is one we continue together, and with deepened conviction.
– AL Zimbabwe Country Director, Beloved Chiweshe
Vision
Our vision is a world in which citizens are active, leaders are responsible and institutions are accountable. It is a world in which resources are used wisely, decisions benefit everyone fairly, and people lead secure lives.
Mission
Our mission is to make governance work for people through supporting active citizens, responsible leaders and accountable institutions.
Our Values
- Integrity
- Learning
- Equity
- Transparency
- Solidarity
- Mutual Accountability
The Impact We Created
Strengthening People Centred Governance
New Narratives for Accountability in Zimbabwe (NNAZ) Project Closeout
In 2025, we concluded the flagship New Narratives for Accountability in Zimbabwe (NNAZ) project, which we had implemented with support from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) since April 2020. Through the project, we built communities that strengthened governance from the ground up by promoting innovative, community-driven accountability approaches. The communities remain a key anchor for ALZ, and some alumni are using our approaches in creative ways, in the process increasing our impact.
The NNAZ Project’s close-out processes brought us closer to the people through a number of interventions that were supported by the Embassy of Switzerland to Zimbabwe. Ending the project in an ethical, orderly, and responsible fashion ensured we remained close to our communities of place and practice in meaningful ways, setting the stage for being a useful community-strengthening and ecosystem builder beyond the NNAZ Project.
Rooted in the Lab’s commitment to proximity to people, an ethical and responsible exit is essential to protect trust, safeguard community partnerships for future engagements, and ensure that gains were not undermined. Our community exit meetings together with our CivActs partners formally concluded the NNAZ project, in the process strengthening local governance and encouraging sustained civic engagement beyond the NNAZ Project.
The meetings provided a platform for the Lab to announce the completion of the NNAZ project, thank community members and partners for their contributions, reflect on achievements over the past five years, consolidate lessons learned, and discuss strategies for maintaining the project’s outcomes beyond its lifecycle. Across all four meetings, participants included local community leaders, Community Frontline Associates (CFAs), civil society representatives, local authority representatives, councillors, and other community stakeholders.
In addition to community close-out meetings, ALZ also prioritized sustaining its community of change-makers by hosting a series of alumni events, crucial touchpoints for reflection, celebration, and forward-looking collaboration among program graduates, including accountabilitypreneurs, Voice2Rep artists, film fellows, and integrity icons. Collectively, these events successfully transitioned the project’s conclusion into a springboard for future collective action, ensuring the accountability ecosystem remains vibrant and interconnected. Furthermore, they nurtured relationships with diverse people and stakeholders.
NNAZ Project Close-out Ceremony. Photo 1 featuring Alumni, former fellows, Dr McDonald Lewanika, Mr Ramses Gauthier (USAID Deputy Mission Director), & Ms Liliane Tamuenz, SDC Deputy Head of Cooperation. Photo 2 Mr Beloved Chiweshe.
During the four years of implementation, the NNAZ project:
- Engaged approximately 733,803 citizens both online and offline.
- Supported forty-three (43) young emerging civil society leaders and activists to build institutions and initiatives around governance and accountability at the local level.
- Supported forty (40) young musicians and thirty-five (35) young filmmakers to promote accountability through audio-visual means.
- Produced forty-two (42) songs featured in four full albums and one Extended Play (EP) album, with at least five Voice2Rep artists receiving national recognition for their social justice efforts using music at the Zimbabwe Hip Hop Awards, the Bulawayo Arts Awards, and other awards ceremonies.
- Produced thirty (30) short films and mini documentaries on local accountability issues, with three receiving honors and awards at the national level and several traveling the world through film festivals.
- Published six (6) key research papers and policy briefs on critical accountability issues in Zimbabwe, with at least three of these being used as the basis for parliamentary engagement and capacity building.
Alumni close-out event in Harare with two fellows and Voice2Rep artists. Top left: Alumni BBQ cookout. Top right: Celebrity Chef and guest of honour Carl Joshua Ncube and his manager. Bottom left: ALZ staff during the closeout event. Bottom right: Ms ALZ intern and former accountabilitypreneur.
The African Youth Panel (AYP) Project
Arts4Change
Cultivating Connection with Public Service Governance Champions
The Integrity Icon Campaign
Although funding constraints meant that Accountability Lab Zimbabwe did not run the Integrity Icon Campaign in 2025, the Icons themselves remained indispensable members of the accountability ecosystem. They are among ALZ’s most strategically valuable bridges to state institutions and power holders at every level of governance.
We have always treated the campaign as a tool designed to do more than recognize individual civil servants. We have been using it to build a network of trusted insiders committed, often at personal cost, to the values of transparency, accountability, and public service. In 2025, that network proved its enduring worth precisely because the formal program had paused. The Icons remained in post, in communities, and in relationship with ALZ and through them, the Lab retained meaningful access to the corridors of institutional power that civil society organizations so often struggle to enter.
Two of ALZ’s Integrity Icons, Fundile Nkala and Godknows Dembure, co-founded Zimbit Solutions, a technology company that developed the Automated Teacher Transfer System (ATTS). The AI-optimised dashboard is designed to combat corruption in the transfer of teachers between schools. For years, teachers seeking transfers to better-resourced schools were compelled to pay bribes, while the opacity of vacancy management within the system made accountability nearly impossible. The ATTS brings transparency to this process, replacing discretion with data.
The Ministry of Primary and Secondary Education has expressed keen interest in piloting the dashboard, a significant signal of institutional appetite for the solution. With support from ALZ, Zimbit Solutions secured intellectual property rights through official copyright registration for the ATTS. In recognition of the Lab’s foundational role, Zimbit Solutions offered ALZ a 10% equity stake in the company. It is precisely the kind of unlikely, accountability-driven innovation that gives us hope in our approaches.
Through the NNAZ project’s community exit meetings, ALZ was able to convene and engage ward councillors and in some exit meetings, members of Parliament attended. The elected representatives sat alongside community members to reflect on five years of accountability work and considered what sustained civic engagement might look like beyond the project’s lifecycle. This kind of structured, face-to-face dialogue between citizens and their elected representatives is what we have been building over the last five years, and we hope it will continue.
The work with Icons showed us they are not merely award recipients, but assets that bring ALZ closer to power. Even in years when the campaign does not run, the network holds and through it, ALZ continues to access, influence, and constructively engage the institutions that shape how citizens access government services.
Our Partnership with the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC)
At the national level, ALZ’s ongoing partnership with the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) further deepened the organization’s proximity to formal state accountability architecture. ALZ supported and participated in a high-level multi-stakeholder process convened by the Zimbabwe Anti-Corruption Commission (ZACC) to craft Zimbabwe’s 2025 SADC Regional Annual Anti-Corruption Monitoring and Evaluation Report as part of Zimbabwe’s obligations under the SADC Protocol Against Corruption. That we were able to partially support this convening shows the commission’s trust in ALZ.
Through the planning, implementation, and production of the report, we gained proximity to power and contributed to anti-corruption efforts in 2025. Supporting and participating in the convening placed ALZ at a table that included the National Prosecuting Authority, the Financial Intelligence Unit, the Judicial Services Commission, and the Zimbabwe Republic Police, among others. As one of only a few civil society voices in that room, ALZ ensured that community perspectives on corruption and accountability were embedded in a report that will shape Zimbabwe’s standing within the regional anti-corruption framework.
By contributing data, analysis, and advocacy insights on the 17 key indicators in the SADC M&E framework, ALZ helped shape the evidentiary basis for assessing Zimbabwe’s anti-corruption performance at a regional level. This proximity to power indirectly influences delivery of service to the communities we work with, including some who experience corruption, impunity, and institutional failures that the report captures, and we hope will help address.
Ecosystem Building Across Sectors and Borders
Supporting the NGO Directors’ Summer Retreat
Our ecosystem building extends beyond our own programming and our partners. One such ecosystem building strategy has been partnering and supporting the National Association of Non-Governmental Organizations (NANGO) in the convening of the NANGO Annual NGO Directors’ Summer Retreat. The retreat brought together over 120 NGO directors and civil society leaders for two days of strategic reflection, peer learning, and cross-sector dialogue at a moment when the sector was navigating some of its most significant disruptions in years. Held under the theme “Navigating New Frontiers: Development Financing and Civic Space in Transition”, the event tackled a broad range of issues including shrinking civic space, the operational implications of the PVO Amendment Act, the withdrawal of US government funding, the push for localization, preparations for the FATF mutual evaluation and Zimbabwe’s 4th UPR cycle.
Dr Lewanika, the Country Director for Accountability Lab Zimbabwe, delivered the keynote address at the retreat. ALZ’s support for and presence at this convening reinforced its role not just as an accountability actor in Zimbabwe, but as an anchor institution within a wider community of practice committed to transparency, civic participation, and responsible governance. The retreat also offered ALZ an important opportunity to share its own experience of navigating the year’s disruptions, especially the ethical close-out of the NNAZ project.
The Informal Sector
Accountability Lab Zimbabwe participated in a national symposium on mandatory taxation for the informal economy in Zimbabwe, convened by the Vendors Initiative for Social and Economic Transformation (VISET), and the Labor and Economic Development Research Institute of Zimbabwe (LEDRIZ). The Lab contributed to a dialogue on balancing revenue generation with fairness, transparency, and inclusion for the informal sector. With informal employment now accounting for over 85% of Zimbabwe’s workforce, according to ZIMSTAT, the engagement reinforced the importance of ensuring that informal sector actors are not only taxpayers but also active stakeholders shaping accountable fiscal governance. Engaging the sector is ecosystem-building efforts will remain a useful strategy. This builds on earlier work with the informal economy with VISET during the implementation of the NNAZ Project.
Learning from the Regional and Continental Ecosystems
The Baraza created space for conversations between grassroots movements and civil society in Africa. At the Digital Rights and Inclusion Forum (DRIF25), we hosted a side session on Ubuntu and AI Governance, exploring the ethical and cultural dimensions of artificial intelligence in knowledge production. In Cairo, ALZ co-convened a session with Firelight Foundation on civil society resilience in the wake of the collapse of traditional aid architecture, presenting findings from the Global Aid Freeze Tracker and introducing Accountability Lab’s Civic Strength Partners (CSP) to help organizations navigate institutional transitions while preserving their teams, knowledge, and impact.
The Social Movements Baraza in Accra. Photo 1: featuring ALZ staff Mr Beloved Chiweshe (far left) and Mr Samuel Takawira (far right). Photo 2 featuring ALZ staff Mr Beloved Chiweshe (far left) and Dr McDonald Lewanika (far right).
ALZ also participated in the Pan-African Conference on Illicit Financial Flows and Taxation in Johannesburg, convened to mark the tenth anniversary of the Thabo Mbeki High-Level Panel report. The engagement deepened ALZ’s understanding of fiscal governance trends and contributed to a broader continental dialogue on tax justice, public finance transparency, and closing the governance gaps that continue to fuel capital flight from Africa.
The Social Movements Baraza in Accra. Photo 1: featuring ALZ staff Mr Beloved Chiweshe (far left) and Mr Samuel Takawira (far right). Photo 2 featuring ALZ staff Mr Beloved Chiweshe (far left) and Dr McDonald Lewanika (far right).
ALZ’s Arts for Change alumni carried Zimbabwe’s creative accountability work onto a continental stage at the AfroTellers conference in Johannesburg in October 2025. Alumni participated in a fireside chat on Artivism for Citizen-centred Governance, delivered live performances, and exhibited work showcasing how art drives civic inclusion.
Across all these engagements, ALZ used the spaces to showcase its approaches to ensure it remains connected to the wider regional and continental ecosystems for learning and scouting for partnerships.
Other Program Highlights
African Cities Research Consortium
Accountability Lab Zimbabwe has been implementing work on local governance as part of the African Cities Research Consortium. As part of this work, ALZ is studying informal settlements and urban informal markets in different locations in Zimbabwe, including Dzivarasekwa Extension, Caledonia, and Hopely. ALZ uses this research to understand and navigate the politics of land distribution, service delivery, and daily governance, as well as how these processes are inextricably intertwined with the national-level political settlement and reflect the co-creation of order and disorder among the state (ZANU PF), the opposition, local authorities, local leaders, and informal actors.
Project Legacy Storytelling
As part of the NNAZ Project’s conclusion, AL created a comprehensive archive to preserve its legacy (2020–2025). This includes an audiovisual database documenting the program’s development, participant experiences, media coverage, and the four-month close-out process. This archive ensures the project’s stories and outputs are available for future use.
A curated selection from this archive was used to create the NNAZ Legacy Wall, unveiled at the closeout ceremony. It consists of five murals that visually depict the project’s timeline, highlights, milestones, achievements, and participant contributions, explaining what was accomplished, why it mattered, when it occurred, and who was involved. The NNAZ Legacy Wall, now permanently displayed at our office, stands as the final report of what five years of locally led accountability work can produce.
End of Project Evaluation
Accountability Lab engaged an independent consultant to conduct a goal-free End of Project Evaluation of the New NNAZ Project. The goal-free approach was used to understand both intended and unintended outcomes of the project, without relying on predetermined indicators. This method enabled the evaluation to explore the dynamics of change within the accountability ecosystem, emphasizing adaptive implementation, sustainability, and scalability of results.
NNAZ Legacy Wall
Media Coverage
Shifting Narratives
Social media impact
Our People and Governance
ALZ Team 2025
Dr. McDonald Lewanika
Country Director
Beloved Chiweshe
Programs and Campaigns Manager
Honest Rugadza
Senior Finance Officer
Thulani Mswelanto
Research and Development Officer
Zvikomborero Octavia Tafirenyika
Administration Officer
Bathabile Dlamini
Media and Communications Officer
Zibusiso Dube
Program Officer: Trans-local Projects
Tinotenda Matsvai
Administration Assistant
Ishumael Chigwedere
Driver
Beatrice Macebe
Office Assistant
Board Members
- Blessing Gorejena (Chairperson), Human Rights Lawyer
- Dr. Bhekirosi Moyo, Adjunct Professor & Director Africa Centre for African Philanthropy, University of Witwatersrand, Board Member.
- Nikosikhona Dibiti, Former Accountantpreneur and Director of Community Podium
- Sakhile Sifelani, Executive Director, Women in Politics Support Unit,
- Dr. Helmut Orbon, Retired development practitioner and political scientist.
New Board Appointments
- Abraham Jawi, Senior Banker FBC Bank
- Tendai Kunaka Chieza, Human Resources Manager for the JF Kapnek Trust,
- Dr. McDonald Lewanika, Former ALZ Country Director and current ALESA Executive Director.
Dr Lewanika transitioned to lead Accountability Lab East and Southern Africa and Mr. Beloved Chiweshe succeeded him as Country Director of Accountability Lab Zimbabwe at the end of 2025.
Supporters
Donors
CivActs Partners
Research Partners
Arts4Change Partner
Miscellaneous
Financials