by Newman Tekwa
Female participation in commercial agriculture as part of women’s work in Zimbabwe remains inadequately documented and theorised. In a context of land reform and framed within the Transformative Social Policy framework, this paper seeks to highlight commercial agriculture as a new work role for women that challenges the existing gender system characterising commercial agriculture as a male-dominated occupation. Primary data gathered through ethnographic fieldwork, which formed part of the author’s doctoral research, reveals that the post-2000 land reform programme in Zimbabwe created a cohort of women commercial farmers, 12% are A2 farm owners according to government statistics. Within the study site, Mkwasine sugarcane farming area, 24.4% of the redistributed commercial sugarcane plots were allocated to women, justifying the exploration of women farmers in commercial agriculture, a research niche yet to be adequately documented in the Zimbabwe land reform literature.Women commercial sugarcane farmers are defying the gender system to claim the “farmer” title, once a preserve for men. This is despite household work remaining a female responsibility making “being a farmer, a housewife and a mother just too much work for women.”
Read the full article below or download HERE
05.FA_April-2023_Volume-4-Issue-1_That-Woman-is-a-‘Farmer22