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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Women’s rights and patriarchal culture

Background

“Women face many challenges. Some of them result directly from traditional ideas of our community and from patriarchal structures. Some of them are exacerbated by these structures.” So says Cynthia Gwenzi, Gender Officer at Platform for Youth Development in Eastern Zimbabwe.

So are societies in Southern Africa patriarchal? The answer is yes, both pre-colonially and as a result of colonial history.

Oppression of women pre-colonial and colonial

African historian Jeff Guy postulated in 1990 that “the best way to understand the oppression of women in pre-colonial societies in southern Africa is to look at the production systems of the time…these societies were based on the appropriation of women’s labour”. Today, such materialist views – while not wrong – have been supplemented by a broader cultural history that restores women to a place as agents of action at all times. The icon for this is Nehanda Charwe Nyakasikana, who was a powerful spiritual leader in the first anti-colonial struggle in Zimbabwe.

History shows that the colonial period massively reinforced the patriarchal system. One example from Zimbabwe was the de facto ban on young women (from the age of 12!) from entering into an arranged marriage. In pre-colonial times, women still had the possibility to run away with a lover over all mountains and thus come to a love marriage, which was subsequently regularised by the families. The colonial marriage law, however, stipulated that marriage and cohabitation “always” required the consent of the pater familias.

The history of colonial jurisprudence and administration, and also of the Christian mission, shows that the patriarchal ideas of colonial masters and missionaries repeatedly led to an alliance with particularly patriarchal interests of Africans. There is no doubt that many mission stations were a haven for young women seeking liberation from confining conditions. However, this liberation usually came at the price of subordination to the paternalism of the mission leaders.

Racist and patriarchal interpretations of “traditions”

The Zimbabwean social scientist Rekopantswe Mate recently wrote for the journal afrika süd about customary law as a racist and male-biased version of culture and tradition. According to Mate, this customary law is stable because religion, the education system and also the idea of “development” make it difficult for women even today to have an emancipated view of history.

Thus, customary law and moral condemnations often go hand in hand. To this day, women who escape male control are denied honourability and are often called “prostitutes”. Even moving to the city undermined a woman’s respectability. Women in the city therefore developed new codes of honourability – although it remains important to maintain contact with the family in the countryside. This example in particular shows well how new forms of patriarchal oppression emerged during the colonial period, as well as new forms of gender identities as lived by women.

Cultural debate under the sign of an anti-feminist backlash

Those who invoke culture still use one of the most significant weapons in the debates around women’s rights. NGOs representing women’s rights are portrayed by many, not least the ruling party, as a kind of Trojan horse with which the West is trying to maintain neo-imperialist control over Zimbabwe.

Feminists and their organisations, on the other hand, stress that women’s rights are indeed a Zimbabwean issue and also emphasise the role of these rights in Zimbabwean cultures. For example, they describe child marriages as a “harmful cultural practice”: not because they are necessarily rooted in local cultures, but rather because the patriarchal twisting of culture leads to excesses and then legitimises them as “traditions”.

An example of this was the introduction of laws against domestic violence in 2006. In the end, the women’s minister and civil society organisations prevailed. However, the debate was heated and loud, precisely because opposition politicians also joined the camp of the rejecting men’s guild. They said that women were not equal to men and that this “diabolical” law undermined the traditional status of men. For the state to interfere in the private affairs of men, they said, was against culture and tradition. Obedience in marriage and modest dress were promoted as traditional mechanisms against gender-based violence.

A missed departure?

The fact that such colonially overlaid currents of argumentation can persist to this day is actually astonishing. For in the 1970s, young women were invited to take on new roles as liberation fighters in the anti-colonial war. Many did – and many were disappointed. If this phase can be called a first phase of feminism in Zimbabwe, one must speak overall of a patriarchal backlash in the name of traditionalism and nationalism.

Women make history

Is there a way out of this backlash that could do without a critical examination of history? How else do women* defend themselves against those who invoke supposedly unshakeable traditions and defend patriarchal culture as “genuinely African”? With what awareness could the argument be refuted that the commitment to “fairness and equality … is anti-cultural, un-African and thus subversive”?

Rekonpatswe Mate points out that above all, the changeability of pre-colonial practices must be brought back into focus. That cultures and traditions should bring solutions to communities and not exist for there to be something that is absolute and unchanging. And she stresses that the lack of reflection on the influence of colonial rule weighs heavily. That is why a direct recourse to pre-colonial models that are supposedly vouched for today is not useful. Overall, Rekonpantswe Mate seems to have little hope that the conditions and a good space exist today for such a historical debate.

Broader alliances for a progressive culture

The fepa partner organisation Platform for Youth and Community Development, of which Cynthia Gwenzi is a member, takes a somewhat more positive view. Hope could come from the fact that the debate on women’s rights and culture is breaking through the usual binary political system in Zimbabwe. What started in 2006 with the debate on domestic violence is still evident today: politicians from all camps are publicly campaigning against gender-based violence. This opens up possibilities for civil society engagement and alliances among women, where discussions about progressive and emancipatory elements in traditions become possible. For Cynthia Gwenzi, this is one of the levers to fight for a progressive culture.

If you want to know more about the conditions for feminism and activism for women’s rights, visit our information page on Afrofeminism or follow us on Facebook for regular updates. Don’t forget to share the events and like fepa!

Appendix: Aspects of historical gender relations in Zimbabwe, based on Mate et al.

Pre-colonial gender relations

• Zimbabwe is ethnically and culturally diverse. Cultural identities have always been fluid: women in particular acquired multiple identities through marriage and moving.
• Patrilineality: for most ethnic groups, group membership, and thus access to resources or inheritance, runs in the patriline.
• Patriarchal: pre-colonial societies in Zimbabwe were male dominated.
• Women had a lower status. Extended families disposed of them as gifts to powerful people, as debt pawns or as surrogate wives. Women born into privileged circumstances tended to remain protected.
• Marriage “was a kinship-motivated and male-dominated social, economic and political alliance between or within kin groups”. In other words, marriage was not a pure love match, but was meant to serve families and communities.
• The “bride price” was an expression of these reciprocal relationships: Families exchanged valuable productive items with the wife’s parental family.
• Wives were given access to land and could earn their own income on it to feed the family. In Shona culture, they could also bequeath the income they had earned themselves.

Christianisation and colonialism

• Economically, women benefited from new opportunities until about 1930. Then, when the colonial economy needed more male labour, the workload for women increased sharply.
• At the same time, a colonial legal system was established that severely limited women’s opportunities. Men were given new ways to control women if that helped maintain control over men. In the context of a dual legal system, a patriarchal “indigenous” customary law solidified, claiming moral supremacy to this day.
• Christian communities offered new role models and femininities, characterised by “domesticity”. They propagated male-dominated forms of agriculture.
• Many women’s activities were lost: in pre-colonial times, women were still more common as craftswomen, as healers or midwives, or they also went hunting with men. Many of these areas were re-regulated to the detriment of African women.
• The “bride price” came in for sweeping criticism as a monetisation of marriage. In practice, however, it is still the prerequisite for a marriage that is considered respectable.

Women, Violence and Peace

Zimbabwe is a fragile state whose inhabitants have experienced much violence as part of political conflicts. Since 2000, committed women and entire groups of women, e.g. urban market traders, have repeatedly been the targets of gender-based and sexual violence.

Gender-based violence is also a major problem in everyday life, as our project partners report.

Women, whether in Zimbabwe or Switzerland, need to be better protected from violence in relationships.

Women are also perpetrators. And women are central pillars for peace policy. Their commitment to non-violent conflict resolution is not only important – it can also be promoted.

Since Covid

The Shadow Pandemic since the outbreak of the Covid pandemic has also been strongly felt in Simabbwe. The term Shadow Pandemic was established by the UN to refer to the increase in domestic violence during COVID-19. In Zimbabwe, domestic violence in physical, mental and sexual forms increased by about 40%. It was also strongly felt that more and more young people are involved in sexual activities. This manifests itself in the form of STDs and teenage pregnancies. The reason for this is that they are not busy enough because of the school closures and do not receive the necessary guidance from the pandemic. Marriage of girls out of financial need has also increased.

Legal persecution

On 14 May 2020, three young female politicians were abducted and tortured. The high-profile and award-winning human rights lawyer Beatrice Mtetwa says it clearly in a letter to the President of Zimbabwe: This is a crime that has been perpetrated against women because, as women, they interfered in national politics.

Zimbabwe’s progressive constitution as a basis for improvement

Zimbabwe has since 2013 had a constitution that enshrines gender equality as a fundamental principle of the nation. However, much remains to be done before existing laws are in line with the constitution and implemented. The commitment of many organisations and groups to human rights and in particular to women’s rights is therefore central to building an equal and peaceful society. fepa has partners in Zimbabwe who advise, support and network women.

Today’s reality

Violence against women is widespread in Zimbabwe. It is difficult to determine the extent of it. Women have many reasons not to report the perpetrators. The police usually remain inactive, many women are not aware of their legal rights, they are also tormented with insensitive, accusatory questions or even subjected to physical attacks.

The fact that the health services and the police do not systematically collect data on violence against women also makes it difficult to determine the extent of acts of violence.

Here are a few figures from surveys and scientific studies:

• Almost half of all women have experienced physical or sexual violence. One in three women experiences sexual violence before the age of 18.
• 43 per cent of girls between 13 and 17 said they were forced to have sexual intercourse for the first time.
• Zimbabwe has one of the world’s highest rates of underage girl marriages: Three years after Zimbabwe’s Constitutional Court declared child marriages unconstitutional and set a minimum age of 18, the government has yet to put structures in place to implement this court ruling.
• 6.6 percent of women between the ages of 15 and 24 are HIV-positive. In sub-Saharan Africa, gender-based violence is the main cause of HIV and AIDS infections among women. Men often have extramarital sexual relations and their wives do not have the power to enforce the use of condoms. So they live in constant fear of infection.

Causes

The main cause of gender-based violence is the power imbalance between men and women. Women are disadvantaged in many areas: Land ownership, education, inheritance rights, etc.

• There is a culture of silence among women. 34.7 per cent of women surveyed said they had not told anyone that they were being abused. Violence against women is seen as a family problem and policy measures are therefore not taken. (Zimbabwe Health and Demographic Survey of 2005-2006).
• Women who have no income of their own are most often exposed to physical violence because they depend 100 per cent on their husbands. One affected woman says of herself: “I wish so much that I had a job. My husband always beats me with clenched fists when I tell him that we have nothing to eat at the end of the month. I can’t even report him to the police because that would only make my situation worse. If he was locked up, I wouldn’t be able to take care of my children at all…” (Gender Based Violence and its Effects on Women’s Reproductive Health: The Case of Hatcliffe, Harare, Zimbabwe).
• Data from Zimbabwe shows that intimate partner violence is most often perpetrated against women between the ages of 15 and 49. These women have children to care for and are dependent on their partners. 35 percent of this age group has suffered physical violence. Every third woman suffers emotional violence from her husband.
• A woman’s level of education is crucial. A scientific study found that 77 percent of women who suffered physical violence had only primary education, 20 percent had secondary education and 3 percent had tertiary education.
• fepa project partner PYDC Gender hits a crux of the matter with the demand “Give us books, not husbands”.

Consequences: Health and well-being at risk

Many studies have shown: Across the planet, gender-based violence is a huge and underestimated factor in illness and death.

• Violence against women has serious psychological, physical and social consequences. Survivors suffer from depression, panic attacks, guilt, shame and loss of self-esteem. Sometimes they are disowned by their partners and their families. Pregnancies, dangerous abortions, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual dysfunction, chronic infections leading to infertility – all these are consequences of acts of violence against women. They destroy health and life energy.
• Rape and physical violence cause more deaths of women than other factors such as cancer, traffic accidents, wars and malaria. One in five days of illness for a woman between the ages of 15 and 45 is due to gender-based violence.

This makes it easier to understand why Cynthia Gwenzi is not only the gender coordinator for PYCD but also the “wellness officer”. It is not about sauna facilities, but about questions of well-being. Wellness as a question of survival!

Future perspectives for the reduction of violence…

The problem of gender-based violence has been recognised in Zimbabwe. The government developed a 2012-15 strategy against gender-based violence. But not much has been implemented yet. Ultimately, such changes cannot be achieved simply or alone by the good programmes of international organisations. It especially needs the many committed women, including our partner organisations YETT and PYCD Gender. You can find out what these organisations are doing personally from the two activists.

… and the strengthening of peace

The same applies to strengthening peace and transforming conflicts: The participation of women at the grassroots level is a prerequisite for success. The starting position for this is not good as long as there is a lack of rights and opportunities for women to participate in decision-making processes. So here, too, we know what needs to be done: to empower women at all levels so that everyone has an equal say in the future. Let’s do it!

fepa Journal

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The fepa journal is published twice a year and has been produced for over 60 years. Since 2018, we translate parts and since 2021 the entire journal. However, it is at the moment for financial reasons not possible for us to produce a fully designed version with all pictures.

Journal September 2024

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Journal 2024 with annual report is only available in a deepl AI translation. Please accept our apologies for the critical problems with the design, and some of the translation.

Journal September 2023

Topics

60 years fepa: Review and outlook on context and partner organisations

Journal May 2023

News and annual report

Climate justice: funding and compensation for Africa

Music in Zimbabwe: between commerce and criticism of the system

Women’s rights and gender justice

Culture: Ndomzy

Annual report

Journal October 2022

Ubuntu: Community and development

Young women: Commitment to equality

Youth: The Future demands full participation

Culture: Thandoe Sibanda

Journal May 2022

News and Annual Report 2021

Journal October 2021

Role models and peer learning

Men engaged

Zimbabwe: Inclusion and rights of people with disablities

South Africa: Voices from South Africa