Global health monitoring and evaluation partnerships as contested spaces in Zimbabwe

Background: Global health partnerships (GHPs) have flourished across Africa as alternative governance mechanisms seeking to strengthen local health systems for effective national planning, implementation, monitoring, and evaluation. Mutual and trust-based relationships anticipate fostering relations that build weak systems for improved availability of data and information for local informed decision-making and programme learning.Objectives: This article aims to explore and demonstrate how global health monitoring and evaluation partnerships (GHMEPs) are contested spaces contrary to the pervasive collaborative discourse in official government policies.Method: Data for this study were collected using content analysis of existing documents and key informant interviews for a qualitative case study. Furthermore, monitoring and evaluation (ME) policy documents and key informant interviews with the ME staff from the Ministry of Health and Child Care, Zimbabwe, were purposively selected. Ethics clearance was sought from the University of KwaZulu-Natal, HSREC/00002455/2021.Results: The results show that GHMEPs are contested spaces despite the expectation to foster mutual trust and improved availability of quality data and information for informed decision-making and learning. Evidence shows partner contests through unspectacular soft power strategies to counterbalance resource and power imbalances in partnerships.Conclusion: The evidence of unspectacular soft power strategies suggests that collaboration for ME conceals and prolongs opportunities for addressing practical and contested challenges, hence failing the test for ideal partnerships.Contribution: The article contributes to a critical understanding of the limitations of the current theorisation of partnerships, which erroneously assumes trust, mutuality, and equality between resourced and under-resourced partners.