By Beatific GumbwandaCHIREDZI – Chiredzi Rural District Council has resolved to come down hard on Village Heads without proper toilets, moving to fine traditional leaders first as a way of pressuring them to enforce sanitation among villagers in their areas.The local authority says the strategy, which came out during a recent full council meeting, was meant to fast-track its drive toward zero open defecation and ensure rural households across the district have adequate ablution and solid waste disposal facilities.Presenting the council’s Second Quarter Report during the 17th full council meeting held recently, CRDC Chief Executive Officer Ailes Baloyi said kraal heads without proper ablution facilities would be the first to face penalties, on the understanding that they would then “cascade the gospel” of proper sanitation to the villagers under their jurisdiction.”In this quarter, we are targeting 71,885 homesteads to have proper solid waste disposal facilities, as we are currently standing at 35,943. What it means is that we are going to be giving fines to those who do not have, and we will begin with village heads so that they will cascade the gospel to the villagers,” said Baloyi.According to the report, the district is currently at just over 50 percent coverage on solid waste disposal pits, against a 2026 target of full coverage across all 71,885 homesteads.Coverage of homesteads with proper ablution facilities showed the actual opendefecationfree measure stood at 37.53 percent, translating to 26,979 of the 71,885 target homesteads by the end of the second quarter. Council’s overall target for the year is 100 percent coverage.Open defecation was explicitly flagged by council as one of two major challenges facing the district in the quarter under review, alongside the proliferation of illegal schools, underlining why the local authority is turning to punitive measures against village heads rather than relying solely on voluntary compliance.Baloyi said council was equally focused on improving sanitation at public spaces such as business centres and markets, where ablution facilities remain scarce.”The local authority is targeting 100 ablution facilities at all public places where people are holding their businesses and markets,” said Baloyi.Progress on that front has been slower with the report showing only 10 of the targeted 100 public ablution facilities had been constructed by the end of the second quarter, against council’s target of full coverage by year-end.The villagehead fines strategy is not happening in isolation. Council’s second quarter highlights show it has also been holding stakeholder engagement meetings with traditional and community leaders, a process it says has improved feedback channels and helped roll out its Settlement Permit programme.Four villagemapping awareness campaigns were carried out during the quarter under the leadership of Chief Gudo, Chief Tshovani, Chief Masivamele and Chief Chilonga, evidence of the growing role traditional leadership is playing in council’s development and compliance drives.The sanitation push sits within a broader national framework under the Minimum Service Delivery Standards for Local Authorities introduced through Statutory Instrument 170 of 2025. Council’s second quarter report also disclosed that an external audit for the 2025 financial year began on 24 June, and that the local authority is targeting 500 kilometres of road maintenance, 5 kilometres of new road construction and 10 new culverts for the year, alongside its water, sanitation and environmental programmes.Zimbabwe has made significant progress in ending open defecation, with the national coverage of improved sanitation increasing from 37 percent in 2013 to 55 percent in 2023. The country was declared open defecation free (ODF) in 2021, a milestone acknowledged by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF). However, maintaining this status remains a major challenge, with the Ministry of Health and Child Care now requiring all institutions, including local authorities, to have functioning sanitation facilities as part of keeping the ODF status.The ministry reported that several districts have been reclassified as having open defecation again and are now in a red zone, a situation attributed to the El Niñoinduced drought which saw villagers diverting their efforts to food production at the expense of sanitation activities. Chiredzi, which was declared ODF, is among the districts now considered at risk of losing its ODF status due to sanitation backsliding. Between 2022 and 2023, there was a slight increase of 2.5 percent in open defecation nationally. However, from 2023 to 2024, the country recorded a huge reduction in ODF coverage due to the drought, leaving villages with ODF status struggling to maintain the gains. The World Bank, UNICEF and other development partners have indicated that maintaining ODF status is harder to achieve than the original certification.
