4.6. The effects of identity formation on contemporary Shona women
4.6.3. Access to resources
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Examining women’s work in Zimbabwe reveals two main factors. First, it indicates how the limited resources of the majority of women and their households are used, for example, farm produce is used to make food which is then sold in the informal market. Second, the types of work in which the majority of women are engaged shows
“patterns of commercialisation of skills that women have used in the domestic sphere,” for example sewing or crocheting, and farming or housework (Moyo and Kawewe 2002:173). As the Tanzanian President, Julius Kambarage Nyerere, at the Third World Conference on Women in 1984 could remark:
The majority of Zimbabwean women who are not employed are found in rural areas where they ‘toil on land they do not own, to produce what they do not control and at the end of marriage through divorce or death, they can be sent away empty handed’ (cited in Kambarami 2006:6).
Participant Torai asserted that:
I was married in 2004 and in 2006 I was divorced. My husband had started drinking and had extramarital affairs. He had a girlfriend older than his mother. I decided to go back to my parents. I left empty handed and did not even have money for transport. At my parents’ home they would not accept me and they insisted that I go back to the abusive marriage. I declined and decided to leave the rural area and visited my friend in Bindura. It is where I was arrested and charged of trespassing and theft.
This leads to the next section, which deals with the impact of gender on access to resources.
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enhance their lives as well as those of their children. The ultimate decision-making position in a family lies with the male head. Property, including the wife and her children are resources belonging to the man. Women and children are the source of labour both in the domestic and the agricultural spheres. This labour is seen as a resource which is owned by the male head of the house (father, brother, husband or brother-in-law) (Chauke 2006:125). As Chitsike (2000:75), notes:
Women are unpaid and unacknowledged workers for their male relatives, and their labour is accrued to the mens’s assets.
As regards money, in customary thinking, the woman may not personally own large sums of cash, as whatever she earns in fact belongs to her husband, as reflected in the saying ndeya baba, meaning “it belongs to my father/husband”. It is therefore very difficult for women to access savings with which, for example, to start up a micro-enterprises. Indeed, because of the payment of bride-wealth, a woman is in fact owned by her husband and
“has no economic rights” (Chitsike 2000:73). Chitsike (2000:74) goes on to confirm that
“gendered patterns of ownership and control of assets impact on women’s ability to build businesses” and are therefore at the heart of economic and social injustice.
In terms of land ownership, once again “inheritance of wealth, especially land, the only asset for peasants, is parcelled out among the eligible male offspring, [systematically denying] women’s equality as full partners in property rights” (Kawewe 2001:479). As is reiterated by Chitsike (2000:75), land is owned and inherited by males. The women’s role is to farm for their fathers, and later for their husbands, and finally for their sons, farm on the land that they do not own. The harvest product is not theirs either, but the men’s property.
Women can legally inherit in post-land reform resettlement areas, but on communal lands (i.e., the former tribal areas) where the majority of women live, plots are in practice allocated to husbands only, leaving women vulnerable to eviction upon divorce or widowhood (Goebel 2002:463).
In regard to the legal situation, as pointed out by Lovemore Madhuku (2010:31) the Zimbabwe Supreme Court has set out the division of property within customary marriage as follows: “In African law and custom, property acquired during a marriage becomes the husband’s property whether acquired by him or his wife,” although the wife
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is entitled to her amai and maoko property: the former refers to the livestock given to the woman for her daughter’s marriage and first pregnancy; while the latter includes “all property acquired by the woman through her personal labours.” Nevertheless, in practice, women continue to be sidelined in terms of access to resources within the family setting.
This is discussed in more detail below in section 5.6.5 dealing with family.
Women surveyed in 1984 complained that their “lack of access to land, education, technical training, to credit for seed and fertilizer, or to markets, income-generating activities, and labour-saving devices” were obstacles to raising their living standards (Seidman 1984:428). More recently, this lack of access to resources h a s also b e e n e v i d e n t in the urban areas, where the barriers to property ownership by women contribute to making it difficult for urban women to lift themselves out of poverty.
Women do not have access to education and regular employment which means they are usually not able to get credit that would help them improve their situation (Sheldon in Middleton 2008:259).
The Ministry of Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development (2009:7) put forward a number of areas in which some improvement has been made as regards women’s access to resources. For example, women farmers have been supported through various policies and programmes, such as the Zimbabwe Agricultural Policy Framework 1995-2020 and the Macroeconomic Framework 2005-2006. Skills training in entrepreneurial and agricultural activities such as sewing, bread making and the Master Farmer certification are now being offered to women. Further programmes to economically empower women and other vulnerable groups include credit and microfinance, educational financial aid, agricultural assistance such as irrigation schemes, and trade and marketing assistance, including help in the cross-border trade sector.
Despite the above-mentioned progress, the Ministry of Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development (2009:7) acknowledged that:
Deep-rooted structural impediments impede the advancement of women.
Poverty, especially feminised poverty… exists where women are more impoverished compared to men. Cultural and patriarchal power relations disempower women from accessing, owning and controlling resources. Not having a voice in decision-making results in women not benefiting from national resource distribution or other entitlements, [which]... increases women’s vulnerability and translates into greater poverty among women
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compared to men.
Mirroring such impediments, Participant Rudo narrated her fruitless efforts to access financial resources:
My husband is a farmer and has no inputs to embark on farming. I went to Prison Fellowship to ask for fertilizer and seeds and they did not help me.
In principle they said they would offer me help and they did not. Now I am tired of it. I went to ZACRO to ask for the same inputs and they also did not give this to me... I need money to start a business of handwork and that the organizations working with ex-prisoners give me a loan for a start. CBZ Bank lends money but it is very little. I need a reasonable amount of money to go and sell in Botswana or Angola. I used to sell in South Africa as well but my passport expired.
The same participant was in touch with the Ministry of Women Affairs, Gender and Community Development to seek their help, but to no avail.
The inability of the majority of women to access resources because they are considered a low priority in the disbursement of the country’s limited assets has deepened their poverty and also impacted negatively on their health, in that they cannot afford decent food or housing, and are unable to access medical care, a situation worsened by the onset of the HIV and AIDS pandemic.