Levels of poverty in rural Zimbabwe are unacceptably high and are increasing. The income poverty situation for rural farmers is exacerbated by multiple shocks and stresses, including climate change, the economic crisis and COVID-19. Farmers have limited adaptive, adsorptive and transformational capacities, making them increasingly vulnerable, and there is a need to build their resilience capacities. Using further statistical data analysis of the secondary data collected during the Zimbabwe Resilience Building Fund Programme (ZRBF) Outcome Monitoring Survey (OMS) three rounds for the years 2019–2021, this study determined the poverty levels of the ZRBF recipient households, explored the relationship between social-economic status (extremely poor, poor and non-poor) and resilience capacities of rural households involved in the ZRBF Programme. The study also investigated the factors of the beneficiary households that have both increased resilience capacity and improved socio-economic status. Our analysis found that in round 3 most households were in the extremely poor category. Thus, people had moved from being poor in 2019 and 2020 to extremely poor in 2021.The results found that there was generally an increase in resilience capacity, especially for the non-poor. A binary logistic regression found that female-headed households were more likely to be less resilient. In addition, the extremely poor and the poor households are less likely to have a high resilience capacity compared to non-poor. It is recommended to implement resilience programmes that target interventions that can have a lasting positive impact on the poor and extremely poor.