Women, Land and Poverty in Zimbabwe: Deconstructing the Impacts of the Fast Track Land Refrom Program

The question of land in Zimbabwe has always been political and gendered. Whereas land reform was necessary in the context of highly unequal land ownership patterns and poverty, this paper shows that the Fast Track Land Reform Programme diminished opportunities or spaces for women to be empowered and shrunk the democratic spaces for genuine participation of women in the development process by denying them rights to land, widening gender inequalities and ultimately failing to alleviate their poverty. Women and men’s differential access to land and the trajectories that push women to the margins were taken for granted. The failure of the government to seriously consider women’s land questions of ownership and control does not only reflect the indifference of hegemonic masculinities to the gender-land interface but also a crisis in development and democracy whereby women continue to be victims. It is of paramount importance to note that giving women land does not automatically lift them out of poverty, allocating land to a “unitary household” does not guarantee women’s ownership of land and collating women’s needs with those of men does not ensure sustainable livelihoods for women or democratic outcomes. There are also significant factors relating to women’s ability to utilize land and to influence production and consumption decisions within households and communities which in turn determine the ability of land reform to alleviate women’s poverty. Thus, post land reform policies should consider women as an independent social category with specific and different questions relating to land.