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Herald Reporters

Zimbabwe is committed to achieving the target of reducing child mortality rate to less than 12 per 1 000 births by 2030, Vice President and Minister of Health and Child Care Dr Constantino Chiwenga has revealed.

VP Chiwenga said this after meeting Unicef outgoing country representative Ms Laylee Moshiri at Kaguvi Building.

Speaking after the meeting, VP Chiwenga paid tribute to UNICEF for assisting Zimbabwe in disaster, education and health.

He said Unicef had always been assisting Zimbabwe since independence and played a critical role in the establishment of village health workers and also in neonatal health.

He said Zimbabwe and Unicef had done a lot through the organisation’s National Health Development Fund.

“The fund helped in establishing our health village workers which is key to good health delivery. Unicef has played a major role in that aspect through its various donors which they put together to assist in those areas.

“We also have a target for bringing the mortality rate of children to less than 12 per every 1 000 born children by 2030 and that is the ambition we want to achieve.

“As Government alone we will not be able to achieve it and Unicef is there in full force to support us and we are quite sure that we will be able to achieve that,” he said.

VP Chiwenga said they had also discussed with Ms Moshiri on their plans and how the Ministry of Health and Child Care was collaborating with other ministries who deal with children issues.

Ms Moshiri described Zimbabwe as a peaceful country and said Unicef was there to support Government and Ministry of Health and Child Care in their efforts towards ensuring all children grow to be healthy and that they can thrive and develop.

“Our role is to support the system strengthen in various dimensions towards becoming resilient. We saw that the pandemic was quite a challenge across the world, but their  system was able to continue and to challenge the pandemic.

“We are also grateful to our donors who are supporting us with development fund, the United Kingdom, European Union, Sweden and Ireland which help us to have this pool funding to address all the various  dimensions of the work of the health development fund towards maternal and health care fund.

New born care, nutrition, vaccines and other medicines as well as supporting policy and planning, human resources and results-based financing which have shown very good outcomes in Zimbabwe and hope we will be able to continue with the help of our donors in the next phase of the national health delivery fund in 2022,” she said.

Meanwhile, Ms Moshiri also bade farewell to Speaker of the National Assembly Advocate Jacob Mudenda at Parliament.

She commended Parliament for playing an important role in enacting legislation that protect children’s rights especially girls.

She added that Unicef would continue working with Parliament in coming up with legislation that protect children and was in line with international norms.