Women Farm Workers in Zimbabwe: The Social Policy Outcomes Two Decades after the Transformative Fast Track Land Reform

Abstract

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, protective 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embroiled  in precarious livelihoods, poverty, inequality, and marginalisation, and are worse of than they were in the superseded land tenure regime.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.