LIKE millions of people across Britain, Tracy Mavuka does most of her grocery shopping online. Each week the 27-year-old care worker sets aside £20 and orders items such as rice, cooking oil, salt, chicken and soap.

But no van draws up outside her flat in Southend, Essex. Instead, the box will arrive two days later at her mother’s shack in Chitungwiza township, just outside Harare. Without it, Mavuka fears that her mother and five younger brothers and sisters would starve.

“I used to send money home,” she says, “but inflation is so high that, from the moment Mum got it, it would be losing value. Then it would cost her a fortune for transport to the shops, which half the time had empty shelves. Now at least I can make sure they eat.”

Over the past year several innovative UK-based websites and text messaging services have sprung up enabling the millions of Zimbabweans who have fled their country to transform hard currency into anything from a tankful of petrol for a friend in Harare to a month’s supply of blood pressure tablets for an ageing aunt in Bulawayo.

Such transfers are enabling friends and family back home to survive amid inflation of more than 3,700%, which has rendered the Zimbabwean dollar almost worthless.

Apart from food and petrol, these websites offer generators to survive Harare’s 20-hour power cuts, satellite TV subscriptions, mobile phone time and even the chance to pay for medical check-ups.

More than a quarter of Zimbabwe’s population has left since 2000 – an estimated 3.4m people. Most are in South Africa but hundreds of thousands are believed to be in Britain. According to the International Organisation for Migration, 74% of Zimbabweans abroad send money and goods back home.

Research presented at a migration forum two weeks ago by Bat-sirai Mubaiwa, from the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Zimbabwe, revealed that more than half of all Zimbabweans are now dependent on relatives abroad.

While the official exchange rate is Z$500 to £1, the market rate is Z$80,000 to £1. Thus someone remitting £100 per month from Britain is providing Z$8 million – about 20 times the average monthly salary for a secretary in Zimbabwe.

Without these remittances, many Zimbabweans say they would starve. The cost of living doubled last month and, according to the Central Statistical Office, prices rose by 100.7%.

Four out of five Zimbabweans are jobless, and those in work earn on average only Z$300,000 to Z$600,000 a month, not enough to buy groceries for the family, let alone to pay for transport, clothes and education.

Zimbabwe, under the rule of Robert Mugabe, now has the world’s lowest life expectancy, and people say they are living “an 001 type of life”, explaining: “0 breakfast, 0 lunch, 1 dinner.”

It is not just the poorest who have become dependent on relatives overseas. “I’ve started sending money back to my mum,” said James Mushore, a merchant banker now living in Surrey. “Yet my dad was the first black millionaire in the country. Everyone is being pauperised.”

A study by a London money-transfer company has estimated that half the Zimbabweans in Britain are sending £50 a month, making a total of many millions per year. Even more is thought to be sent back by Zimbabweans in South Africa. “That’s what keeps the regime going,” said Mushore. “They’ve destroyed exports and it’s their main source of foreign exchange.”

But with the value of the currency declining so fast that workers are demanding to be paid weekly, many Zimbabwean exiles share Tracy Mavuka’s preference for sending goods rather than money.

Perhaps the most innovative site is Mukuru.com through which petrol can be ordered by text message. The company is the brainchild of eight young Zimbabweans working from their bedsits in London. One of them, Rob, explained: “We’re basically a bunch of geeks playing around with SMS and realised the power of sending text directly from the First World into the Third World.”

A payment made in sterling over the internet leads to a 10-digit number being sent by SMS to the mobile phone of the recipient in Zimbabwe. He or she can then collect 20-litre vouchers redeemable at six different petrol stations in Harare, thus avoiding long queues as well as having to find the money.

Since the company started last year, Mukuru.com has acquired 8,000 clients. “Yes, we may be propping up the regime,” said Rob, “but if it comes down to your own flesh and blood – is your sister going to eat or starve – what would you do?

“You send them money; now you can send them health” states the website of Beepee Medical Services, which offers anything from a regular supply of insulin for diabetics to open heart surgery. The company was set up in November by a Zimbabwean doctor in Canterbury after he lost his 19-year-old brother to kidney failure in 2005.

“He could have lived for years with regular dialysis,” said Dr Brighton Chireka, who has lived in Britain since 2000. “We could not get the medicines in Zimbabwe and had to get people to bring them in from South Africa, which was very difficult and haphazard. The time came when he needed medicine and we couldn’t get it and we lost him.”

Anyone with hard currency can go to Chireka’s site and book a medical consultation or order medicines for a relative in Zimbabwe. He works with a group of doctors and pharmacists who bring in the medicines from South Africa.

“The situation in Zimbabwe is critical,” he said. “If you go into hospital in Zimbabwe, it’s like going to a bring-a-bottle party: you have to bring your own medicine, your own drip, everything. Doctors are on strike. I have no doubt thousands of people are dying unnecessarily.”

Zimbuyer.com, where Mavuka does her shopping, is an online supermarket that works like Ocado or Tesco.com but has no name on its lorries for fear of reprisals. The company takes 60-70 orders a week for deliveries in Harare and Bulawayo, and its most popular products are cooking oil and salt, which are hard to find.

“Previously people would send money to their families to buy groceries,” said a spokesman for the company in Harare, “but because of shortages and constant price increases, money wouldn’t be converted to food.

“Prices are going up every day. Yesterday I was looking at some electricity cable and it was Z$1.9m. Today I went back to the shop and it was Z$2.5m.”

One of the biggest difficulties for Zimbabweans is finding money for education. When the new term started last week, school fees had risen by 600%-1,000%, forcing many parents to withdraw their children.

The Progressive Teachers’ Union of Zimbabwe said recently that the country had already lost 4,500 teachers this year. Last year the figure was 6,000. Some have emigrated. Others cannot afford to teach and look for jobs elsewhere.

Yet astonishingly this country – which has seen its economy shrink more than any country in peacetime – was last week elected deputy head of Africa’s largest trading bloc and will host its next summit. The state-con-trolled Zimbabwe Herald described it as “another show of confidence in Harare’s leadership in regional and international fora”.

The election of Zimbabwe as vice-chair of the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa comes on the back of its much criticised selection to head the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development and a seat on the executive board of the African Development Bank.

Not only is the country’s maize crop predicted to be less than a third of requirements, making this the sixth consecutive year of insufficient food, but widespread bread shortages are expected. The state media reported last week that only 10% of the targeted winter wheat crop had been planted.

This was blamed partly on a lack of tractors. As the slide backwards continues, the Central Bank announced last week that it was setting up technical colleges to produce at least half a million ox-drawn carts and ploughs.

Cost of helping

One month’s supply of frusemide blood pressure pills: £1

An x-ray: £10

20 litres of petrol: £10

10 chickens delivered to the doorstep: £25

Two litres of cooking oil: £3.28

School exercise book: 85p

Four toilet rolls: £2.95

Small generator: £375

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