Introduction
ActionAid Zimbabwe along with civil society actors, researchers, legislators, and representatives from relevant government ministries held a three-day online/virtual Tax Justice and Gender Responsive Public Services (GRPS) Summit from the 30th of August to the 1st of September 2021. Primarily, the summit grappled with the current state of public service provision in the health, education, and water sectors. It sought to dissect the challenges and opportunities along the whole value chain of service delivery. This entailed more public scrutiny on how pro-poor government’s policies are concerning how public revenue is mobilised, allocated, disbursed, spent, and accounted for as required by the Constitution of Zimbabwe, Section 298, principle of public financial management. Music, poems, and drama were among the tools that were used to stimulate reflection on the state of public service delivery and how women are disproportionately affected. Background The Tax Justice and GRPS was anchored on four main Domestic Resource Mobilisation (DRM) topical issues namely, a rights based approach to tax justice rooted in the Constitutional rights awareness; the unnecessary surrender of government’s right to tax corporates through overly generous tax incentives; limited tax transparency ballooning corruption, tax avoidance and tax evasion risks by large scale businesses, wealthy and politically well-connected individuals; and the insidious impact of global taxation architecture that fuels the culture of impunity, the syphoning of resource from Africa mainly by Multi-National Corporations (MNCs).
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