I HAVE been travelling in parts of East and Central Africa and after putting the puzzle pieces together, came back understanding how Zimbabwe embraced demographic destruction programmes that have quietly strangled the country’s competitive future.
What is apparent, is a quiet catastrophe, that rarely makes the front pages of Zimbabwe’s newspapers and almost never finds its way into the speeches of her politicians.
It is not the kind of catastrophe that arrives suddenly with fire and noise. Decades ago, it arrived slowly, dressed in the respectable language of development economics and international public health policy.
Our health practitioners travelled far and wide to be upskilled on the tenets of this movement. Economists shouted from rooftops about the benefits of this movement and why Zimbabwe needed to jump on its bandwagon so that it would not be left behind.
The movement was called family planning and for decades, Zimbabwe embraced it with the enthusiasm of a student eager to impress a teacher. Having less children was progress.
The lesson Zimbabwe was never taught is that in the theatre of modern economic competition, numbers are not merely a demographic detail. Numbers are power. Numbers are markets. Numbers are the very foundation upon which national prosperity is either built or denied. When you have numbers, your bargaining power elevates.
Do not get me started on India with a population size of over 1,4 billion and 972 million being of working age and government employing a mere 14 million. Where are the rest in the economic activity of the country? Entrepreneurship at best operating at different levels and within various sectors.
Now, consider the arithmetic of ambition in southern and eastern Africa today. Zimbabwe occupies 390 757 square kilometres of land, a territory larger than Uganda by a significant margin. Yet Uganda has managed to fill that smaller canvas with approximately 45 million people. Kenya, with land comparable to Zimbabwe’s, carries a population of roughly 52 million.
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Zimbabwe, meanwhile, sits at around 17 million people and calls it progress. The country is physically substantial but demographically threadbare and in the contemporary African marketplace, that distinction matters enormously.
Kenya’s economy stands at approximately 88 billion dollars and ranks 66th in the world. Zimbabwe’s economy sits at 31 billion dollars and ranks 101st. That is not merely a gap. It is a chasm that widens every year because the engine of economic growth, which is consumer demand at scale, keeps firing in Nairobi and Kampala, while Harare tries to run the same race with a fraction of the fuel.
When businesses and investors scan the African continent looking for viable markets, they ask one question before almost any other: how many people can buy my product? Zimbabwe’s answer has consistently underwhelmed.
This is the commercial reality that development economists and international public health specialists rarely acknowledged or even knew when they arrived in Zimbabwe with their family planning programmes and their confident projections.
In the competitive architecture of modern markets, population size determines everything from the attractiveness of foreign direct investment to the negotiating leverage a country commands in regional trade agreements.
Nigeria draws capital because with a population of 233 million, it has 220 million active consumers. Ethiopia commands attention because its population surpasses 110 million and is growing. Kenya and Uganda are genuine continental players in part because their combined consumer base approaches 100 million people. Zimbabwe is not in that conversation and the family planning era is one of the principal reasons why.
Zimbabwe’s fertility rate fell from 4,88 births per woman in 1990 to 3,64 by 2006, a decline that development agencies celebrated as evidence of modernity taking root.
What those agencies did not adequately consider was the economic context in which that decline was happening. The Western nations that designed these programmes had undergone their demographic transitions alongside industrial revolutions that created employment, prosperity and the social safety nets that made smaller families rational and sustainable. Zimbabwe was being asked to shrink its population without the economic transformation that could have justified the exercise!
Then the emigration began in earnest. Economic and political instability transformed Zimbabwe into one of the most prolific exporters of human capital on the continent. Net migration swung from a modest surplus of 4 900 people in 1990 to a staggering deficit of 108 700 by 2010. By 2023 that annual loss had settled at over around 2 million people.
These were not primarily the elderly or the infirm. They were young Zimbabweans, educated, ambitious and precisely the demographic that a growing economy needs to innovate, consume and build.
The HIV/Aids epidemic compounded this injury with a cruelty that statistics can barely convey. HIV-related deaths rose from 12 000 in 1990 to a catastrophic peak of 109 360 in 2003. An entire working generation was taken in the space of a decade and the demographic recovery from that loss has been slow and incomplete. Zimbabwe entered the 21st century simultaneously emptied by disease, drained by emigration and restrained by family planning ideology.
Uganda, with a smaller territory and far fewer resources at independence, has built a consumer market and a growth trajectory that international investors find genuinely compelling. Kenya long ago established itself as the commercial capital of eastern Africa in large part because it had the population density to support sophisticated retail, financial and technology sectors. Those ecosystems did not emerge from thin air. They emerged from markets of tens of millions of people who needed services and were willing to pay for them.
Zimbabwe possesses natural advantages that most African nations would envy. Its land holds gold and diamonds and platinum and chrome and lithium. Its agricultural terrain is fertile and its geographic position in southern Africa is genuinely strategic. But natural resources without the population to extract, process, consume and export them at scale remain perpetually underutilised. A population of 17 million people spread across nearly 400 000 square kilometres cannot generate the density of economic activity that turns resource wealth into living standards.
The projections ahead offer little comfort. Fertility rates are forecast to fall further still from 3,65 births per woman in 2023 to 2,45 by 2043. Unless Zimbabwe deliberately and urgently rethinks its relationship with population growth as a national economic strategy the gap between itself and its neighbours will not close. It will widen.
The argument here is not one of sentiment or nationalism. It is one of markets and mathematics. In the era of the African Continental Free Trade Area in which the free movement of goods and services across the continent is the declared ambition of 54 nations, economic weight matters. Countries that bring large consumer bases to the negotiating table shape the terms. Countries that arrive with small populations accept them.
Family planning was presented to Zimbabwe as civilisational progress. What it was in practice — when stripped of ideological dressing — was a managed reduction in the very resource that growing economies cannot do without: people. Competitors were not standing still while Zimbabwe planned its families. They were multiplying. They were filling their markets. They were building the consumer bases that attract investment and sustain growth. Zimbabwe must now reckon honestly with the economic cost of a policy it once wore as a badge of development. The dots connect with uncomfortable clarity. Fewer people meant a smaller market. A smaller market meant less investment. Less investment meant fewer opportunities and fewer opportunities meant more emigration. It is a cycle that begins with a misreading of what development actually requires and the time to correct that misreading is not tomorrow. It is now.
- Ndoro-Mkombachoto is a former academic and banker. She is the chairperson of NetOne Financial Services, a subsidiary of NetOne Telecomms. She has consulted widely in strategy, entrepreneurship, private sector development, financial literacy/inclusion for firms that include Seed Co Africa, Hwange Colliery, RBZ/CGC, Standard Bank of South Africa Home Loans, International Finance Corporation/World Bank, United Nations Development Programme, United States Agency for International Development, Danish International Development Agency, Canadian International Development Agency, Kellogg Foundation. Gloria is a writer, property investor, manufacturer and keen gardener. Her podcast on YouTube is @HeartfeltWithGloria. — Cell: +263 7713362177/ [email protected]
