Chiedza Makura only learned she had been dismissed from her nursing job when a WhatsApp message came through on the evening of 28 January. The 37-year-old single mother of three worked as an HIV nurse at Zim-TTech, a private voluntary organisation established out of the University of Washington’s International Training and Education Center for Health in 2003, to provide HIV and Aids-related services.
“I felt shuttered,” Makura told the Guardian, after finding herself out of a job and struggling to feed her family and keep them in school. For the past three years she had been earning $500 (£400) a month. “My job was my only source of income. I still do not know what to do,” she says.
