HARARE – The ministry of health and child care recorded zero expenditure on contraceptives throughout 2025 despite a budget allocation of ZiG 65 million for the items, a Parliament Budget Office analysis of the ministry’s fourth quarter has revealed.

The analysis, tabled before the parliamentary committee responsible for health, described the nil spending as “alarming given Zimbabwe’s adolescent birth rate,” warning it carried direct implications for maternal mortality, family planning and HIV prevention.

The zero contraceptive expenditure was among several critical supply chain failures identified in the analysis.

Drugs and medicines reached only 28.7 percent utilisation, while maternal and child health care supplies – allocated ZiG 515 million – were drawn down to just 24.8 percent, a shortfall the budget office linked directly to the poor maternal mortality outcomes recorded in the quarter.

The institutional maternal mortality ratio stood at 131 per 100,000 live births against a target of 115.

Only 53.22 percent of health facilities maintained the minimum tracer medicine stock threshold against a 60 percent target, while just 82.5 percent of ambulances were functional.

Tracer medicines are a standardised list of essential drugs selected to represent the broader availability of medicines at a health facility. When authorities measure whether a facility has met the minimum tracer medicine stock threshold, they are checking whether that facility holds adequate supplies of each item on the list.

A facility that falls below the threshold is considered to have inadequate medicine stocks overall. The measure is used as a proxy indicator because assessing every medicine at every facility is impractical – if a facility cannot maintain the tracer list, it is unlikely to be adequately stocked more broadly.

The budget office tasked the ministry to explain its specific plan to address the contraceptive supply gap and reach the tracer medicine target.

The fourth quarter report, covering October to December 2025, was itself submitted on April 8, 2026, outside the 60-day statutory deadline prescribed by Section 33(2) of the Public Finance Management Act.