ZDI’s just launched research report gives us an overview of of democracy and the state of human rights in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic. The report demonstrates how the public health sector is suffering from institutional weaknesses emanating from political institutional designs and how this is negatively affecting public health delivery. Read on for more.
The study reveals that the public health sector in Zimbabwe suffers political institutional designs and institutional weaknesses that inhibit quality service delivery in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic. Institutional weaknesses identified in the study are traceable to patronage networks that have enabled rampant corruption and poor service delivery in the health sector.
The study posits that instead of plugging the gaps of corruption in the sector, the government has resorted to creating political institutional designs that have worsened the challenges of poor service delivery and incapacitation in the public health sector. These institutional designs include patronage networks, identity politics and militarisation of the public health sector. Militarisation has been done in three related approaches – militarisation by recruitment, militarisation by deployment and militarisation by appointment.
It is exposed in this study that the political institutional designs put in place have led to incapacitation of the public healthcare that manifests in form of a de- motivated, intimidated and disgruntled workforce, industrial action, brain drain due to the exodus of skilled workforce in the sector and linguistic barriers to healthcare delivery.
Read the full report here (1MB PDF)
Source: Zimbabwe Democracy Institute
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