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Sikhumbuzo Moyo, [email protected]

CABINET yesterday approved the Health Workforce Strategy (2023-2030) and Health Workforce Investment Compact (2024-2026) aimed at ensuring a sustainable and resilient health workforce capable of supporting the country’s goal of becoming an upper middle-income economy by 2030.

The report on the two strategic documents was tabled before Cabinet the Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Innovation, Science and Technology Development, Professor Amon Murwira, in his capacity as chairperson of the Cabinet Committee on Human Capital Development, Skills Application and Employment Creation.

Information, Publicity and Broadcasting Services Minister, Dr Jenfan Muswere, disclosed the details in a post-Cabinet media briefing with journalists. 

“The Health Workforce Strategy: 2023-2030 aims at ensuring a sustainable and resilient health workforce capable of supporting Zimbabwe’s goal of becoming an upper middle-income economy by 2030,” he said. 

“The five strategic themes for the Health Workforce Strategy are as follows, education, training and development, deployment, utilisation and governance, retention and migration management, monitoring and evaluation, ICT and research and planning and financing.” Dr Muswere said the education, training and development pillar seeks to align all health worker training programmes with health sector needs, to increase annual training outputs from 3 334 in 2022 to at least 7 000 by 2030, to professionalise and integrate community health workers into the main workforce and to refurbish and expand training schools infrastructure.

Under the health workforce retention and migration management pillar, Dr Muswere said the aim is to remunerate optimally in terms of Government modalities in order to reduce the attrition rate by 2030. 

“The health workforce monitoring, evaluation, ICT and research pillar aims to strengthen the health workforce management information system (MIS), to digitalise the health workforce management systems, and to strengthen health workforce research to inform the decision-making processes,” said the minister.

“The health workforce planning and financing pillar seeks to increase per capita investment in health from the current US$9 to at least US$32, with a long-term goal of US$55 per capita.”

Meanwhile, Dr Muswere said Cabinet also considered and approved the report on the Public Service Job Evaluation Exercise, which was presented by the Minister of Public Service, Labour and Social Welfare, Cde July Moyo, following a job evaluation exercise, which was conducted by the Public Service Commission across the 21 Government line ministries whose objective was to establish the composition and value of jobs and functions across the Ministries.

“The key findings of the evaluation exercise included the advancement via grade system, which violates the principles of job evaluation that a job must maintain its grade throughout its lifetime unless the duties of the job have changed to warrant regrading, functional duplications and overlaps in roles within and across line ministries,” he said. 

“The duties and jobs of chief directors and directors being identical, which situation must render one of the jobs redundant, the existence of more managerial jobs than non-managerial jobs and the prevalence of dead-end jobs for specialists.”

Dr Muswere said the findings of the job evaluation exercise will result in the review of manning levels across all line ministries at national and sub-national levels, rationalisation of staff, up-skilling and re-skilling of members, adoption of a new compensation framework and the implementation of a new salary structure to conform with the principle of equal pay for equal work.

“Consultations are now underway for optimisation and rationalisation of the findings with a view to aligning structures to Vision 2030, as well as the mantra of leaving no one and no place behind,” said Dr Muswere.