Information for Rural Development: a Zimbabwean Perspective

Paper presented at the ProLISSA Conference held on 7 ? 11 March, 2011, Pretoria, South Africa by Lawton Hikwa,The library and information services sector in Zimbabwe exhibits a number of characteristics, which set it apart from more conventional aid partnerships. As a non direct target for development assistance, the sector tends to be viewed as a segment of cultural development, without readily measurable outcomes. Similarly state support for the library and information services sector is very much limited, hence the emergence of independent non governmental organisations that were founded to address and attend to the much needed information services in rural Zimbabwe. The state in Zimbabwe is not in a position to devote significant resources to the library and information services sector. It remains a fact that the bulk of the national budget has been devoted to education since independence in 1980; however, there has never been a deliberate emphasis to place books and libraries as a priority in the same budgets. The challenge is more significant to rural libraries, which without development assistance would hardly even exist