Online Reporter
Wallace Ruzvidzo
Herald Reporter
A HIGH-LEVEL delegation from the International Monetary Fund is in the country on a week-long mission to discuss the global lender’s pending Staff-Monitored Programme with Zimbabwe.
The IMF’s delegation is being led by Mission Chief for Zimbabwe, Mr Wojceich Maliszewski.
Announcing the arrival of the IMF delegation in a statement yesterday, the Ministry of Finance, Economic Development and Investment Promotion said the SMP was designed to buttress Zimbabwe’s macro-economic stability and cement the country’s standing on the global stage.
“The IMF Mission Chief for Zimbabwe, Mr Wojceich Maliszewski and his team are in the country for a one-week Mission which started yesterday, the January 28 to February 4, 2026.
“The Mission is here to discuss the Staff-Monitored Programme, its macro-fiscal framework, policy commitments underpinning the Programme, quantitative targets and structural benchmarks.
“The SMP is designed to buttress macroeconomic stability, rebuild Zimbabwe’s international re-engagement,” said the ministry.
The Zimbabwean team, comprising the Government, the private sector, development partners and civil society representatives, will update the Mission on recent economic developments and the broader outlook.
Previous IMF missions in the country have provided a backdrop of supportive findings.
The IMF’s last Article IV consultation highlighted easing inflation, improved exchange rate management and stronger than expected performance in agriculture and mining.
The IMF staff noted that monetary tightening and fiscal discipline had helped stabilise the Willing Buyer-Willing-Seller (WBWS) exchange rate and narrow the gap with parallel market rates.
At the tail end of last year, the financial institution put a seal of approval on Zimbabwe’s macroeconomic policies after the global lender praised the reduced reliance on central bank financing.
The multilateral lender underscored the need to sustain the transformative policies to secure long-term economic stability.
It observed that the Government, through the Reserve Bank of Zimbabwe, had significantly curtailed its historical tendency to turn to the central bank for funding, which destabilised the economy.
“It will be important for Zimbabwe to sustain that (policy regime) because it’s this repeated recourse to central bank financing that has created a lot of difficulties in the past also with inflation, with exchange rate volatility and the difficult foreign exchange environment that the country has,” IMF African Department director Mr Abebe Aemro Selassie told the media during the presentation of the lender’s latest Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa in October last year.
“So, we are encouraged by what the Government has been doing in recent months and I think that needs to be sustained.
“Like all countries, a combination of current policies and continued refinement of policies will be key to helping Zimbabwe move forward.”
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