Zimbabwe's Transitional Stabilisation Programme provides the national framework and the opportunity for evidence-informed economic and governance reforms including in promoting peace, healing and reconciliation. In Zimbabwe, the national adaptation and utilisation of the SCORE methodology can enrich and empower the work of the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC) and its institutional partners in terms of effective delivery of their important mandate as well as better targeting and prioritisation of investments, s supporting reform processes and tracking progress towards high-level policy outcomes (e.g. SDGs, healing and reconciliation objectives).
In addition, there is an opportunity to reimagine and enhance civic and corporate strategies that have the potential to address societal fault lines towards a more increased cohesion. Beyond ineffective allocation of resources, policies and programmes that are not well-targeted and well-tailored to the local challenges and needs can create fatigue, apathy, frustration and disengagement among citizens. Having launched and currently implementing its 5 year strategic plan, the SCORE provides the National Peace and Reconciliation Committee (NPRC) with an opportunity to further guiding national policy processes and programmes towards tailored, inclusive and effective healing and reconciliation. Given NPRC’s long term mandate, this is an pertinent moment to provide robust and locally owned evidence that can guide, inform and anchor future work towards social cohesion and reconciliation.
To that end, SCORE Zimbabwe partners namely, NPRC, SeeD and UNDP have launched the SCORE Zimbabwe process in November 2019. While NPRC would be the custodian of SCORE Zimbabwe, SeeD would provide technical support and guidance towards SCORE’s calibration and design and build a strategy towards transfer of know-how in an incremental way to ensure contextual expertise and knowledge is capitalised on and enriched by SCORE’s theoretical and empirical foundations. An incremental approach that is focused on implementing SCORE as a pilot study focused on a specific geographical location would ensure vigour and hands on experience towards a nation-wide scale-up. It would allow partners to fine tune the methodology, build alliances and show results, while identifying thematic and demographic areas for zooming-in in the future waves. SCORE Zimbabwe also aims to incorporate a cross-country fellowship initiative that would aim to bring together and share experiences of implementing SCORE in different contexts with different partnership structures and frameworks.