by Tom Tom and Resina Banda
Women farm workers have so far received limited scholarly attention in Zimbabwe’s agrarian and labour policy literature. This is in a context where a conscious understanding of land reform as a social policy instrument is paltry. Taking women farm workers as the prime focus and using an empirical case study, the paper addresses these lacunae by exploring the redistributive, pro- tective and reproductive outcomes of the fast track land reform. Twenty-two years after the formalisation of the land reform, nuanced evidence shows that even though female farm workers are agentive and engage in diverse livelihood pathways, they experience multiple challenges. Due to the politics of exclusion and inclusion, normalised gender hierarchies and compartmentalisation, as well as policy vacuity, they are embroiled in precarious livelihoods, poverty, inequality, and marginalisation, and are worse off than they were in the superseded land tenure regime. Accordingly, the question of women farm workers is yet to be resolved.The Government of Zimbabwe and other relevant stakeholders should address this question primarily and urgently by placing it on the policy agenda.
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04.FA_April-2023_Volume-4-Issue-1_Women-Farm-Workers-in-Zimbabwe