EAAF worked in Zimbabwe for the first time between 1999 and 2001 at the request of the Amani Trust, a local NGO that investigated missing persons from the massacres committed in Matabeleland in the 1980s in the context of an extermination campaign launched by Robert Mugabe against the local population. EAAF members participated in several missions to train local personnel in forensic anthropology techniques and to conduct exhumations and analyses of skeletal remains of victims of the political conflicts that occurred between 1970 and 1987.
In the framework of the National Peace and Reconciliation Commission (NPRC), EAAF returned in 2018 to provide training to the NGO Ukuthula Trust (successor to the Amani Trust) in forensic archaeology for the exhumation of mass graves. Members of the organization were trained by EAAF in Zimbabwe, South Africa and Argentina.
EAAF also collaborated on the development of a genetic population database for Zimbabwe’s population, with the aim of enabling DNA identification of missing persons.
