This article reports findings of an evaluation of the Zunde raMambo practice as a survival strategy in selected rural districts in Zimbabwe. The assumption made when the Zunde was being revived was that its revival would go a long way in minimizing food stress in some rural areas. The revival of the Zunde raMambo practice was started in 1996 by members of the Chief's Council of Zimbabwe, in collaboration with the Nutrition Unit of the Ministry of Health and Child Welfare. The main objective was to revive the Zunde as a sustainable community project, in line with what was once a known Shona traditional practice. In attempting to revive this traditional practice, there was a need to assess variables such as the nature of existing social and economic structures, leadership, and the availability of resources such as land and agricultural inputs and implements. The article also reflects on policy issues surrounding rural development and survival strategies used by rural people. The article also suggests that the human factor approach offers the best way to the understanding of peoples' needs, problems and how problems can be tackled. Data used in this article was collected between November and December 1999.

Socio-political conflicts in the Great Lakes Region of Africa have caused an upsurge in the refugees who flee to other regions of the world for safety. Consequently, refugee camps have become common contexts of child growth and development owing to the forced movements of people from their original homes and countries into foreign and unfamiliar ecologies. This article reports part of the findings of a larger exploratory sequential study that explored the nature and quality of refugee immigrant caregivers’ childrearing practices at Tongogara Refugee Camp (TRC) in Zimbabwe. This study reports the resilience in childrearing among selected refugee immigrant caregivers resident at Tongogara Refugee Camp in Zimbabwe between 2013 and 2016. Eighteen (18) refugee mothers and thirteen (13) elders purposively sampled among refugees from DRC, Burundi and Rwanda participated in a qualitative study that used focus group discussions and key informant interviews to collect data. The main finding of the study was that under forced migration conditions, refugee immigrant caregivers become resilient and continue to raise their children despite their traumatic profiles and circumstances. Their resilience emerges from the possession of cultural psychological resources that protect them from traumatic profiles interfering with their child rearing. In addition, it was evident that reconstructed family networks, support from refugee elders as vicars of culture and resistance to psychosocial risk were other mediating factors. The study concluded that psychological cultural templates and reconstructed social networks are strong protective factors for the resilience of refugee caregivers. The key implication for the study is that social actors delivering services in refugee camps should integrate relevant cultural heritage issues in their programmes because they act as protective factors for traumatic experiences that may interfere with child rearing. Sensitive child development programmes are not complete when they exclude children’s socio-cultural context as an important variable.