Women and Economy

Women play a huge role in the overall economy of Zimbabwe and at the same time suffer from a number of disadvantages. As a rough conclusion, one has to state: Women work more than men and are exposed to greater risks.

Zimbabwean women see it as their job to feed the family. They get up early in the morning, do the housework and then go to work.

Women who are economically empowered tend to empower others around them, including their children, families and the community at large.

Women in the labour market

Women have careers and are successful. But the resistance is often very great, as reported by Rosewita Katsande of the YETT youth network, who has been monitoring the labour market and women’s careers for many years.

Unemployment and work in the informal sector

Many women with vocational training are unemployed, especially in urban areas. A study of almost 6,000 young Zimbabweans showed that women have only half the chance of employment in the formal sector: only 5.2% of all women work under a proper employment contract. Conversely, significantly more women than men are employed in the informal sector. However, most employers in the informal sector are men, as a study by the International Labour Organisation (ILO) showed. In recent years, women have increasingly been active in male domains, including small-scale mines or quarries.

Although there are also informal social security systems for the informal sector, many women are unable to make regular contributions. Health insurance is also not very accessible for these women and their special needs. Many women have to manage more than one job to have enough income and a stable financial situation. A large number of women therefore work more than 70 hours per week. The YETT study also showed an enormously high proportion of women who regularly or temporarily earn a sideline income from sex work.

Rural women

In the countryside, unemployment rates among young people are lower than in the city. Here, people still live from agriculture. Although women play a crucial role in the agricultural sector, they are highly marginalised. Women in rural areas work 16 to 18 hours a day, according to recent studies. While men contribute only about 45 per cent of the output in the agricultural sector, the percentage of women’s participation has increased to 55 per cent. However, due to cultural norms, women are subordinate to their husbands/partners and so men make household decisions, about land ownership, finances and all valuable livestock in the last instance, often without prior consultation with their wives. The foundation of the rural economy is access to land. This is often denied to women. Widows, for example, regularly go empty-handed in the distribution of their deceased husband’s inherited land. Large investment projects also often have a particularly negative impact on women, as the example in Chisumbanje shows. In the areas where the so-called Fast Track Land Reforms have been carried out, it is also evident overall that women have been disadvantaged.

Land is one of the most striking examples of how women are excluded from access to productive resources. This also applies to the capital market. The financial status of women in Zimbabwe is significantly lower than that of men. The experience in our pilot project area shows that women have virtually no access to commercial credit, mainly because they cannot bring in any collateral in a world where they are effectively excluded from property and inheritance rights. The micro-banking sector that exists in other countries is completely absent in Zimbabwe’s rural areas.

“Poverty becomes more female”

In the agricultural sector in particular, we find many factors that disadvantage women: agricultural production pays women lower wages, commercial farming (and men) push women off the land and put pressure on producers in particular, which is transferred to working and employment conditions. So in many places, women are pushed into a labour market that pays them inadequate and unfair wages. This may also have something to do with the fact that rural economies mobilise women (and children) during labour-intensive periods, while regular tasks tend to be performed by men. “Poverty has a woman’s face,” writes a Zimbabwean woman, or to google it in technical language: “Feminization of Poverty”.

Household work and unpaid work

The fact that women do a lot of unpaid work in the household, raising children or caring for sick or elderly people is a global phenomenon that is criminally neglected by the economic sciences.

Women who live in places where the infrastructure is poor spend much more time on household chores. A study by the English NGO Oxfam calculated that women from the poorest households spend on average 40 minutes more each day collecting firewood and fetching water than economically better-off women. Over the course of an entire woman’s life, this amounts to a full year. Girls from these households have to spend seven hours more per week on household chores. Of course, this also has an impact on education!

It also means that women start working earlier than their male siblings. Even as children, girls are expected to help out in the household. More on this in the chapter Generations.

Especially in countries like Zimbabwe, where HIV is very widespread, the number of those who can take on such tasks at all is also reduced. The International Labour Organisation found that in Zimbabwe, for every 4 people who can care, there are almost 3 people who have to care for them. The HIV epidemic has burdened many older people, and grandmothers in particular, with many additional tasks.

Families who can afford it hire domestic help in Zimbabwe. The government has set a minimum wage for this sector. In the last adjustment in September, a wage of about 170 Zimbabwe dollars was set if domestic workers could live at the place of work for free. At today’s exchange rate, this would be less than 10 USD. Currently, a domestic worker can barely buy two 10-kilo bags of maize with such a wage.

Climate change makes matters worse for many women and girls. Not only does it cause yield and income losses, thus increasing poverty, which in turn adversely affects women’s opportunities. Climate change also greatly increases the workload for water harvesting, for example. And because women are central to both the production and preparation of food, more elaborate but, for example, drought-resistant crops may also mean more work. All in all, the multiple workload can affect the supply of food for women and their families, whereby it is not only a question of the quantity of food, but also of its quality or balance.

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