Image of Gender, Poverty and Inequality in the Aftermath of Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: A Transformative Social Policy Perspective

Race, Culture, and Identity

Gender, Poverty and Inequality in the Aftermath of Zimbabwe’s Land Reform: A Transformative Social Policy Perspective

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Gender equality is re-emerging as an important global and national agenda with emphasis
placed on closing the gender gap in terms of women’s representation in public and private
decision-making bodies. Though unrelatedly, the period had coincided with the elevation of social
protection in the form of cash transfers as the magic bullet in tackling gendered poverty and
inequality. Adopting a Transformative Social Policy Framework and land reform as a social policy
instrument, the paper questions the efficacy of the current approaches in transforming gendered
poverty and inequalities. Land reform is hardly ever assessed as a policy instrument for its
redistributive, productive, social protection and social reproduction functions. This paper departs
from ‘classical models’ of land reforms, often designed in the mould of neo-liberal discourses of
individual tenure to offer an in-depth reformulation of the land question and notions of land
reforms. It focuses on land reform as a relational question with potential for social transformation
as social policies within the transformative social policy framework relates not only to protection
from destitution, but transformation of social institutions and relations including gender. In the
year 2000, the Zimbabwean government embarked on a radical land reform programme whose
redistributive outcomes saw various categories of women (married, single, and widowed)
comprising 12-18% of beneficiaries gaining access to land in their own right. Data gathered
through a mixed methods approach combining ethnographic and survey methods and analysed
using qualitative and quantitative methods, suggest that access to larger pieces of land, irrigation,
credit, markets and support training services by both women and men had transformed women’s
social and economic situation in relation to men within the resettled areas.

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Language
English
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Subject(s)
Poverty
Gender
Ethnographic
Inequality
Land reform
Transformative social policy
Social and Economic situation
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Article
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