Hope blooms in Dora: how Tearfund's Transforming Communities programme is growing God's kingdom in Zimbabwe
In rural Zimbabwe, a small seed planted in 2012 has grown into a remarkable story of community transformation — reducing poverty, building a health clinic, and bringing churches together.
Analysis
In 2012, Tearfund's partner the Evangelical Fellowship of Zimbabwe introduced the Transforming Communities training programme to the small rural community of Dora. More than a decade later, the results are extraordinary — and deeply rooted in faith.
Pastor Thanks, who first encountered the training as a community member, is now one of its lead trainers. He describes the change in simple, powerful terms: 'Before, my life was so hard and my family lived a life that was painful. After we came across the Transforming Communities approach, it helped us realise that we can take charge of our future, we can change our lives and rewrite our stories.'
The programme works by using Bible studies to help local churches identify the challenges they face and draw on their own resources and skills to address them. It is not about outside solutions being imposed from above, but about communities discovering their own God-given capacity for change.
In Dora, that has meant tree nurseries, chicken and pig rearing, breadmaking, mushroom growing, and fruit orchards. Parents who once could not afford school fees now can. Rates of gender-based violence and child marriage have fallen. Six villages have come together to build a local health clinic — and are now in talks with the government to supply nurses to run it.
Pastor Thanks himself began by buying fifteen lemons for fifty cents. From those seeds he now has a nursery of 850 saplings, which he gives freely to schools and neighbours so they can start their own projects. He even uses discarded plastic bottles as planters, modelling environmental care alongside economic resilience.
'As a leader, you must lead by example,' he says. 'This can work!'
The story echoes Jesus' parable of the mustard seed in Matthew 13 — the smallest of beginnings growing into something that shelters and sustains. Tearfund reports that by April 2025, through more than 57,000 churches worldwide, the Transforming Communities approach had contributed to approximately 19,000 roads, 18,000 schools, 9,000 health clinics, and 19,000 clean water sources being improved or created.
The vision is to see 250,000 churches leading transformation in their communities. Dora is proof that the vision is not merely ambitious — it is already happening, one seed at a time.