Zimbabwe’s public debt servicing crisis leaves countless mothers grieving – NewZimbabwe.com

📅 Published: August 26, 2025

📰 Source: newzimbabwe

Curated by AllZimNews.com

The story of Memory Ncube, a Zimbabwean mother and her baby, Tendai, is a tragic illustration of the human cost of this crisis.

In the quiet moments, Memory’s mind wanders back to the day her world shattered.

Her preterm baby girl, Tendai, had been fighting for her life, struggling with respiratory distress syndrome (RDS).

In a bid to the new life, Memory was transferred from rural  Zvishavane district hospital toMpilo Central HospitalinBulawayo, Zimbabwe’s second-largest city.

This was not because the doctors in Zvishavane were incompetent, but because they lacked the necessary equipment, including a continuous positive airway pressure (CPAP) machine.

Full of hope that her child would make it, Memory traveled 185 kilometers (114. 954 miles) toMpilo Central Hospital, which is one of the referral hospitals for patients from the Southern region of Zimbabwe.

Recently, the hospital received a lifeline in the form of a donation from theHigherlife Foundation, which provided critical equipment, including CPAP machines, suction machines, monitors, jaundice meters, and phototherapy machines.

Prior to this donation, the hospital had been grappling with a shortage of equipment, often resulting in premature deaths of patients.

However, tragically for this family, when she arrived at the hospital, it was too late, and her daughter had died.

She sobbingly recalled her baby’s death:
My heart breaks when I think of what happened to my daughter.

If only there was equipment at the hospital, I was not going to travel all this way with a critical baby.

I wish the government knew the devastating impact of not servicing public hospitals.