This book chronicles how Zimbabwe's boom educational and health systems unravelled after independence in 1980 and how exuberance gave way to pessimism. The uncomfortable truth about how socialism lost its way and the dramatic reversal of fortune is told. No jobs were created for the school leavers, inflation went up and poverty started to creep in. The 1980s actually laid the foundations for the economic problems Zimbabwe now faces. Trapped in an ideological commitment to socialist enterprises, policy makers permitted accountability to slip, carried co-operatives further than they should have, and pandered to socialist greed with its corrupt tendencies.

Zimbabwe: Beyond a School Certificate examines the relations between governance and discursive practices in the modern labour market: the role of institutions of learning and skills development, and the brain drain as creative and retrogressive forces in the economy; labour laws and the job market in a critical methodology for organisational research; and the health system and the poverty datum line as a measurement of the dynamics in industrial development.

This is a genuinely authentic analysis based on statistical data which support the unfolding events in the southern African country. This book is useful for students (and lecturers alike) and donor agencies wanting to know more about Zimbabwe. Organisations helping to fight the HIV pandemic will also find the book a source of information.