In the crowded, tight-knit Kuwadzana township of Harare, Zimbabwe’s capital, 29-year-old Melisa Kasu faced an unthinkable crisis when her mother passed away suddenly, leaving her family completely unprepared. Across Zimbabwe, cultural norms demand elaborate, costly funeral send-offs that feature feasts, entertainment, and community gatherings to uphold a family’s honor. For low-income households, these expectations often push grieving families into crippling debt or push them to sell vital assets just to avoid public shame. But for Kasu, a local mutual aid group stepped in at the worst moment. Arriving with large cooking pots, sacks of cornmeal, and all the other essential supplies needed for the funeral, members of the Kuchemana Burial Society even helped light the cooking fires to prepare food for mourners.
“That’s the time I decided to join them,” Kasu recalled, and she took over her late mother’s membership in 2023. What she discovered after joining is part of a quiet, transformative cultural shift reshaping community mutual aid groups across much of Africa: traditional burial societies, long focused exclusively on ensuring dignified end-of-life ceremonies, are expanding their missions to support members while they are still alive.
Founded by a group of local women in 2021, the Kuchemana Burial Society – whose name translates to “mourning one another” in the local Shona language – was originally created to spare low-income families the public embarrassment of holding a funeral that exposes their financial hardship. Today, it retains its core funeral support: each member pays just $3 in monthly dues, and receives a $150 cash payout when a family member passes away, plus on-site help with food preparation and ceremony logistics. But at a recent gathering of the group held under the shade of a large avocado tree, death was barely mentioned on the meeting’s agenda. Instead, members – most of them women, clad in matching T-shirts and floral skirts – sang together, debated community initiatives, and pitched small business ideas ranging from small-scale poultry farming to homemade detergent production.
Alongside its core funeral services, the society now runs a collective savings fund, where members pay an extra $10 per month to build a pool of capital. Both members and trusted community members can borrow from this fund at a 20% annual interest rate, and all profits from the interest are split between members at the end of each year. The group also operates a bulk grocery purchasing program, allowing members to access staple food goods at lower prices than they would pay at individual retailers. For Kasu, who was laid off from her job at a local hardware store in 2022, this expanded support has been life-changing. She accessed $100 from the savings cycle in December, then borrowed an additional $30 – no complicated bank applications, no strict eligibility checks, no hidden fees. With that capital, she purchased gas tanks and a sales scale, and now runs a small business selling cooking gas to neighbors in her community. “Business is good. I support myself,” Kasu said.
Researchers note that this shift is not unique to Kuchemana, but reflects a broader trend across the continent. With more than two-thirds of Zimbabwe’s workforce employed in the informal sector, most workers lack access to formal bank loans, conventional financial services, and government social safety nets. Formal funeral insurance is the most widespread form of insurance held in Zimbabwe today – a legacy of the tradition’s roots dating back to the early 20th century, when colonial-era migrant workers formed the first burial societies to ensure they could receive a dignified burial if they died far from their home communities while working in neighboring South Africa. Today, official data shows that fewer than one in 10 Zimbabweans can access affordable health insurance, while low-cost funeral policies are widely promoted by insurance providers and even mobile phone companies. But community-run burial societies still fill a gap that formal insurance cannot, members and researchers agree.
“Banks normally do not lend to the poor or the unemployed, and governments are not providing enough support,” explained Sharon Chilunjika, a social sciences lecturer at Zimbabwe’s Midlands State University. “People are using an institution they already trust, the burial society, and expanding it to cover more of their needs.” Chilunjika notes that unaffordable funerals are “one of the most underrated or underappreciated drivers of household poverty” across Africa, where families facing pressure to uphold cultural standards often turn to predatory loan sharks or sell critical farm or household assets to cover costs. Beyond financial support, community burial societies offer a sense of connection and belonging that formal corporate providers cannot match. “It is your neighbor, your church mate. They don’t ask you to fill a form. They come to your home and comfort you,” Chilunjika added.
For the leaders of Kuchemana, the new mission is a natural evolution of the group’s original values. “We wanted dignity in death. Now we are striving for it in life,” said Nyadzisayi Mirisawu, the society’s secretary. “We don’t want members suffering while alive.”