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For the past decade Zimbabwe has experienced a rapid economic decline, which has left many Zimbabweans dependent on emergency assistance for their survival. The existing humanitarian needs within the country are still immense even though the country has experienced some positive developments during 2009, including the formation of an inclusive Government and the introduction of a multi currency system, which ended the previous hyper-inflation.
The political developments has allowed for enhanced humanitarian access to vulnerable populations and resulted in greater engagement of the Government of Zimbabwe with the international humanitarian community. However, despite these positive changes the humanitarian needs remain acute. The country is still in a state of chronic vulnerability and its ongoing humanitarian crisis could worsen if support to humanitarian and recovery actions is not maintained. Historically, Zimbabwe had one of the best basic service infrastructure networks in Africa. However, the socio-economic collapse during the past decade eroded these systems to a degree at which they are unable at most times to provide basic services such as health, water, sanitation and education.
Although humanitarian assistance improved the situation in 2009, for as long as livelihood opportunities do not improve, and emigration remains a prime survival strategy, reversal of the economic decline is likely to be slow and problematic. This underlines the need for recovery activities to be planned and implemented early, simultaneously and supplementary to the continuous humanitarian efforts and in a multidimensional manner so as to limit the prospects of a prolonged crisis on a local level.
Ultimately, the aim of early recovery is to restore communities’ capacity to recover from crisis, to enter a transitional phase and to ‘build back better’ to be achieved through priority early recovery interventions. “Early” in this regard is characterized by the urgency of the needs to be met at one hand, and the types of opportunities for recovery interventions that are immediately available and rapidly generating benefit to the affected populations.