The degree to which the urban poor’s struggles have yielded policy and practical changes in Zimbabwe’s housing sector is little understood let alone acknowledged adequately. Messaging about their struggles has overwhelmingly emphasised how they have experienced repeated demolitions and evictions. This focus has overshadowed their efforts towards assisting the Zimbabwean state to tame its penchant to steer elite ordering of urban spaces. Through dialoguing with and exposing state officials to alternative approaches inside and outside Zimbabwe, urban social movements have aided considerable urban transformation through mutual state–society capacitation. These successes have had limited reach resulting in relevant lessons not being available to comparable African urban jurisdictions. This paper draws on external evaluations of the work of Dialogue on Shelter Trust, Zimbabwe and the Centre for Community Initiatives, Tanzania. Both non-governmental organisations technically support movements of the urban poor in the two countries. The movements are affiliated to Slum Dwellers International through which they access good practices, solidarity for their efforts, and get empowered to act locally. The paper stitches the impacts of this category housing social movements within the context of Zimbabwe’s recent experiences and snippets from Tanzania. It also uses experiences of housing cooperatives that, even with political manipulation, stretching and abuse of the core model, made an impact on housing delivery and broader urban policy. Further, insights from a three-year Inclusive Urban Infrastructure research project (A project funded by the UK Research and Innovations’ (UKRI), Global Challenges Research Fund under the title ‘Towards Trajectories of Inclusion: Making infrastructure work for the most marginalised’ (Grant reference number ES/T008067/1) coordinated by the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies.) in 6 Zimbabwean settlements are drawn on to show efforts of the urban poor on which states can build while simultaneously value-adding to better guide expanded self-provisioning. It concludes that housing social movements have made important advances towards realisation of the right to adequate housing from which other poor urban Africans and those governing them can learn for sustainably and inclusively scaling low-income housing.