This community based study utilized responses from questionnaire assisted interviews of mothers and child minders to determine background factors to domestic unintentional injuries in children aged five years old and below. The study was done in three wards in a rural communal area of Chivhu District in Mashonaland East Province in Zimbabwe. One hundred and ninety six mothers or child minders were interviewed and 25.5 pc of these reported children who had had inadvertent injuries in the two weeks before the survey. Unintentional injuries which took place in the children's lifetime prior to the two weeks constituted 20.4 pc of the sample. Both recent and lifetime injuries were not significantly different in the 105 boys and 91 girls among whom domestic accidents were reported. Falls (68.8 pc), burns (16.3 pc) and scalds (4.7 pc) featured as prevalent types of injuries. The varying severity of injuries was indicated by whether an injured child was taken to a health centre for treatment or cared for at home and the treatment the child received at the place of care. Socio-economic, environmental and behavioral factors did not associate significantly with occurrence of unintentional injuries in the survey though it is suspected that the absence of paraffin poisoning is related to the availability of storage space in the households. Results of the survey indicate that unintentional accidents in five year olds and below are a general problem (chi 2 = 7.22, p = 0.007) in this age group although mothers or child minders realized this only after their children were involved in an accident.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)