ACTION Aid Zimbabwe (AAZ), has challenged the Zimbabwean government to lift the tax burden on vulnerable communities and instead improve the state of public service provision in the country.
By Fadzai Ndangana
AAZ Acting Heads of Programs and Resources Mobilisation Ebenezer Tombo said the government and stakeholders should find ways to interrogate how the tax system is being used to improve lives of people in Zimbabwe.
This was a fruitful engagement as we debated ways to improve public service provision and make them gender responsive, especially in critical sectors of health, education and water, using domestically mobilized resources.
“The provision of public services is continuously taking a nosedive with a rise in privatization and lack of prioritization of public services on the national purse to the extent that these services are being provided. These studies have further reviewed that they are less gender responsive,” Tombo said.
The deteriorating state of service provision in Zimbabwe has been caused by a combination of poor domestic resource mobilization and inequitable distribution, corruption in public sector, low budget allocation towards essential services and slow implementation of the devolution agenda.
The country's tax systems remain weak and prone to evasion, a development that has robbed the national purse of substantial revenue.
While every citizen is negatively affected by poor service delivery, studies have shown that women and girls are the worst affected. One participant, Rumbidzai Makoni noted that women and girls are walking very long distances to reach their nearest water points due to inadequate water infrastructure.
“Communities have to walk over two kilometres to reach their nearest health care facilities, and children have to walk long distances to reach the nearest Early Childhood Development (ECD) centres.
“This has further piled the burden of tax on women and children reducing their productive time and hence lessening their access to economic opportunities,” Makoni noted.
