Zimbabwe receives over $200 million annually from the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), which supports health workers’ wages and HIV prevention programs.

Speaking from the World Economic Forum in Davos recently, Ncube said Zimbabwe will now rely on taxes to fund its healthcare needs. He said:

We are talking about $200 million or so (on PEPFAR) that is at stake. Our response really should be domestic resource mobilisation, which is what we have been doing.

When Ncube referred to “domestic resource mobilisation,” he was talking about a range of new taxes he has introduced. These include a tax on sugar content in drinks and a 1% tax on fast food.

In addition to these, Zimbabweans already pay an AIDS levy and “sin taxes” on beer, both of which are aimed at supporting healthcare. Said Ncube:

All these taxes form the base that we can use to build resource mobilisation to support our health needs. It has to be really through this kind of thinking that we raise resources to support health domestically as foreign funding is under threat.

WHO estimates that more than half of Zimbabwe’s health spending is funded by external donors. This year, the country expects to receive $461 million for health programs, up from $353 million in 2024.

However, the government has struggled to adequately fund public healthcare. In 2025, Zimbabwe plans to allocate just 2.1% of its GDP to health, down from 4% in 2024.

What little funding is allocated to health is often disbursed late. According to Treasury’s 2024 mid-year report, only 27% of the health ministry’s budget had been used by June.