Harm reduction take-off in Zimbabwe

Last February, Mainline staff spent two weeks in Zimbabwe. The country has recently started small-scale harm reduction activities in the form of outreach work and drop-in centres in Harare and Bulawayo.

Funded by The Global Fund through the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the National AIDS Commission in Zimbabwe (NAC), of the Ministry of Health, is responsible for rolling out harm reduction in the country. This includes needle and syringe programming (NSP) and opioid agonist maintenance therapy (OAMT).

To ensure successful implementation of such services, NAC has asked Mainline to write a National Harm Reduction Manual, formulating a national package of essential harm reduction interventions. In addition to this, we have drafted a Harm Reduction Implementation Plan for the years 2027-2030, standard operating procedures (SOP) for needle and syringe programming, and a monitoring and evaluation (M&E) framework with tools and formats for reporting on a set of national indicators.