This has resulted in over-reliance on village health workers (VHWs) who are community cadres that work on voluntary basis to assist the Health ministry.

For many years, she has walked hundreds of kilometres beyond her ward either educating the community on proper hygiene or visiting patients, mostly suffering from malaria.

Community Working Group on Health (CWGH) director Itai Rusike said in a low-resource country such as Zimbabwe, health professionals were a very scarce resource.

“So, to attain universal health coverage we are working with VHWs as they are playing key roles at community level to support the prevention, detection and contact tracing efforts in the COVID-19 crisis,” she said.

VHWs, said Rusike, continued to augment the work being done by the mainstream health sector, raising awareness, giving health advice, monitoring growth of children under five years, mobilising communities during outreach programmes and for immunisation.