Zimbabwe has seen a decline from a high of 60 in 2001-2 to 24.2 in 2022
CLAIM: Ever since sanctions … 56 children per 1000 births die, up from 38/1000.
SOURCE: Rutendo Matinyarare on X
VERDICT: False
A post on how a father lost a child in a Zimbabwean hospital degenerated into a discussion on the impact of sanctions on Zimbabwe’s health delivery system.
In a long post in response to an initial one by an account named @herbertshingi, @matinyarare claimed that ‘ever since sanctions, 697 women die during birth while 56 children per 1000 births die, up from 38/1000’.
The maternal mortality rates have been previously factchecked by FactCheckZW, here. The last census indicated that the maternal mortality rate stands at 363 in 2022, down from a high of 685 in 2005. Nowhere has it been recorded at 697, as claimed by Matinyarare.
But how high is Zimbabwe’s infant mortality rate and how have the trends been since the imposition of sanctions?
Sanctions
The sanctions against Zimbabwe passed by the European Union and the United States have been a significant source of contention in Zimbabwe ever since and date back to 2001-2. Under the restrictive measures, specific individuals are banned from traveling to Europe and the United States, and their foreign assets are frozen. Under the Cotonou Agreement, the EU also suspended all direct development cooperation with the Zimbabwean government.
The US, on the other hand, acted mainly through the 2001-enacted Zimbabwe Democracy and Economic Recovery Act (ZDERA).
So what was the infant mortality rate in Zimbabwe at this point?
Infant mortality refers to the probability of dying between birth and the first birthday. Historically, Zimbabwe reached its highest infant mortality rate in 1960 with 92.5. In post-independent Zimbabwe, the highest infant mortality rates were recorded in 1999 with 65 deaths per 1000.
Three possible explanations have been cited for this 1999 increase in childhood mortality rates. They include the worsening of Zimbabwe’s economic condition at the time and the direct and indirect impact of the AIDS epidemic. Experts suggested that to achieve significant health improvement, there was a need to address the underlying causes of poor health, such as poverty. In the five years prior, since 1994, the economy of the country had declined dramatically, which may have altered household decisions on the use of health services facilities even more.
This was before the imposition of the sanctions. This high rate remained around 60 in the years 2000 – 05, according to the Zimbabwe Demographic Health Survey.
The overall pattern suggests that mortality levels declined during the first half of the 1980s, remained relatively stable for the next 10 years, and then began rising in the latter half of the 1990s.
The rate then began to fall once again from 2010 at 57, 50 in 2015. The 2019 Multiple Indicator Cluster Survey (MICS) puts the rate at 53 in 2019 before going on a downward trend. The Zimbabwe Statistics’ 2022 Population and Housing Census Mortality and Orphanhood Preliminary Results reported that the infant mortality rate stood at a national average of 24.2 per 1 000 live births, with the highest rate recorded in Mashonaland East with 30.2 and the lowest in Matabeleland South at 14.1.
Conclusion
The claim by Rutendo Matinyarare that ‘ever since sanctions … 56 children per 1000 births die, up from 38/1000’ has been rated as false. Data from the Zimbabwe Government through surveys carried out by ZimStat, shows that the infant mortality rate has actually come down from a high of 60 at the time of the imposition of sanctions (not 38) to an all time low of 24.2 when the census was conducted in 2022, not 56, as reported by Matinyarare.
