Zimbabwe’s gold rush adds fuel to a deadly surge in malaria
In Penhalonga, a gold-rich area in eastern Zimbabwe, George Mutsoka woke up one morning suffering from fatigue, a severe headache and joint aches.
The 43-year-old artisanal miner was too weak to work, so he went to rest at his home in Chishakwe village, just outside Zimbabwe's second-largest city, Mutare.
By late afternoon, his situation had deteriorated and he sought help from a village health worker. He tested positive for malaria and the health worker gave him treatment.
“I took the medicine for three days. After a week, I had recovered,” he told RFI.
Mutsoka soon returned to Penhalonga, where he works as an informal miner searching for gold.
Ideal conditions for mosquitoes
There are thousands of artisanal miners in Penhalonga, who carry out open-pit and riverbed mining.
Malaria cases have been spreading fast in this mining community and others across Zimbabwe, as stagnant water pools left by miners prove ideal conditions for the mosquitoes that transmit the disease.
Virginia Chakandinakira, the village health worker in Chishakwe who diagnosed and treated Mutsoka, says that all the malaria cases she documented in her community this year originated elsewhere.
“I have treated four people. Interestingly, they are not based in this village. Some of them are artisanal miners from Penhalonga and others are family members who followed to stay with their husbands in that area,” she says.
A Ministry of Health official, who was not authorised to speak to the media, confirmed to RFI that movements of mining communities are making it harder to get malaria under control.
“Our interventions usually target immobile people. Artisanal miners are mobile and bring complications to the interventions,” said the official. Stagnant water in open pits left by artisanal miners in Mutasa, in Manicaland Province in eastern Zimbabwe. Such pools are breeding grounds for mosquitoes that can transmit disease.
Sungano Mharakurwa, director of Africa University's Malaria Institute in Mutare, says artisanal mining – and mining in general – has intrinsic environmental impact, including habitat expansion for mosquitoes.
“There is a high risk of outdoor malaria transmission, which is not amenable to control by mainstay indoor-based house spraying and bed nets in the mining areas,” he says, adding that research is underway to innovate more ways to prevent malaria in such settings.
Another complication is “the cosmopolitan background of the miner population”, Mharakurwa explains. Many miners migrate from non-malarious regions where they did not grow up exposed to strains circulating locally, leaving them especially susceptible to the disease.
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Deadly surge
Artisanal miners often sleep in makeshift tents without mosquito nets or repellents.
Nyasha Mungwasho, another informal miner from Penhalonga, says his wife and child contracted malaria after they visited him in May. They successfully recovered after Chakandinakira treated them in Chishakwe, their home village.
Mungwasho reports seeing several of his colleagues infected while they worked in Penhalonga. A village health worker testing a patient in Mutare for malaria. Zimbabwe has since cases surge in the past year.
Malaria cases have spiked in Zimbabwe in recent months. Between January and mid-April 2026, 65,399 cases were recorded, compared to roughly 36,000 in the same period in 2025 and 17,000 in 2024, according to the Zimbabwe Ministry of Health's National Malaria Control Programme weekly surveillance report.
Deaths from the disease also surged to 174 between January and April 2026, double the 85 recorded in 2025 in the same period and five times the 34 in 2024, according to the same report.
Experts say this rise in malaria cases is because of a combination of factors, including mining as well as funding cuts and climate change.
Loss of US funding
United States funding cuts imposed shortly after President Donald Trump assumed office in January 2025 led to the discontinuation of critical malaria control programmes in Zimbabwe.
Some of the programmes crippled included the Zimbabwe Entomological Support Programme in Malaria (Zento) at Africa University, which provides the country's national malaria programme with scientific research to combat the disease, and the Zimbabwe Assistance Programme in Malaria II (Zapim II) that supported high-burden districts by strengthening malaria diagnosis, treatment and prevention.
“The funding cuts affected Zento, which was contributing key malaria mosquito surveillance technical data for guiding game-changing malaria vector control by the National Malaria Control Programme,” says Africa University's Mharakurwa.
The university has since used emergency funding from private donors to restart its malaria work.
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Thomas Chuchu, a health programme lead at Save the Children Zimbabwe, which helped implement Zapim II, said the funding cuts disrupted key activities such as the distribution of long-lasting insecticidal nets.
The programme worked through the existing Ministry of Health system, targeting 11 districts across Mashonaland Central, Mashonaland East and Matabeleland North. There are shortages of diagnostic kits, frontline health workers report, while some communities are without mosquito nets. A malaria test showing a negative result in Mutare. Zimbabwe relies heavily on foreign donors for essential equipment such as diagnostic kits.
The cuts also disrupted the leading US malaria control programme, the President's Malaria Initiative (PMI), which operated across dozens of countries in Africa. Mharakurwa says the withdrawal of funding left communities in Zimbabwe stranded, given that PMI provided substantial budgetary support for procuring malaria medicines.
Given that US funding was supporting an impactful portfolio of health programmes, including malaria, he believes its abrupt termination is bound to have aggravated the disease's spread.
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Effects of climate change
Heavy rains have also played a role. Chuchu says Zimbabwe's current malaria surge appears to be linked, at least partly, to the high rainfall experienced in the previous season.
“The rains created favourable breeding conditions for mosquitoes, particularly in already endemic provinces such as Mashonaland Central, Manicaland, Mashonaland East and Mashonaland West,” he says.
Mharakurwa says climate change is worsening malaria outbreaks amid a lack of resources to control the vector-borne disease.
Without protection, Mutsoka and other artisanal miners remain at risk.
“I recently bought a sleeping bag. But we still do not have a mosquito net or repellent,” he says.