Focus on women's lack of access to land

Sheila Makumbo, a former soldier popularly known as "Yondo Sister" counts herself among the lucky few women who have benefited from Zimbabwe's land reform programme. She hit the headlines in local newspapers earlier this year when she had a bumper tobacco harvest, by small-scale commercial farming standards. She was allocated a 40 acre plot at Lifordia farm, 17-km west of the capital Harare, and has so far harvested 10 bales of burley tobacco. However, Makumbo is frustrated that more women have not been given the opportunity. According to official figures, only about 16 percent of land redistributed by the government has gone to women. President Robert Mugabe in 2000 promised that women, particularly those in female-headed households, would be given 20 percent of the total land identified for resettlement under the land reform programme. "We had lobbied government to allocate us 35 percent but the figure was reduced and we eventually settled for the 20 percent," Abby Mgugu, director of the lobby group, Women and Land in Zimbabwe, told IRIN. "A policy document was crafted but it is painful that women did not get their quota." She added: "Women operate in an extremely hostile policy framework and they are treated as secondary citizens in a country where they play a very vital role." A study by the UN's Food and Agriculture Organisation found that, like in other developing countries, women in Zimbabwe do most of the agricultural work and tend to be more dependent on farming. Approximately 80 percent of Zimbabwean women live in communal areas, where they constitute 61 percent of the farmers. Most are unpaid family workers and spend an average of 16 hours a day tending fields. Over half are the head of the household. Their work includes preparing the land, planting, fertilising, weeding, harvesting, and marketing, in addition to household chores like fetching and preparing food, and caring for children. In 1998, when Vice President Joseph Msika was a senior minister in charge of resettlement, he rejected women's demands that land permits be automatically registered in both spouses' names, and for land earmarked for redistribution to be offered to women heads of households and single unmarried women. He said such moves would lead to the break up of families since they would accord women too much freedom. Mgugu said the government's position has been disappointing given that it was a signatory to the UN Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW). According to Article 14(g) of CEDAW: "State parties shall take all appropriate measures to ensure that women have equal treatment in agrarian reform as well as in land redistribution schemes." The government was also a signatory to the Beijing Platform of Action, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) Gender Declaration and the African Charter on People's Rights, all upholding the status of women. Mgugu said the conventions and declarations were merely morally rather than legally binding, leaving the government free to enact laws and policies contrary to the provisions of international agreements. The Land Reform and Resettlement Implementation Plan provided for under the 16th amendment to the Constitution in 2000, did not make specific reference to gender in its call for land to be distributed equally among all Zimbabweans. Analysts blame the lack of gender sensitivity on the government's preoccupation with ensuring its political survival at a time when Mugabe's grip on power was being challenged by the opposition Movement for Democratic Change. Critics have argued that proper policy formulation over land reform suffered as a result of the politicisation of the programme. Mgugu bemoaned the government's lack of monitoring and enforcement strategies, and the lack of statistics on how women's land needs should be addressed. In addition, an audit being conducted by the Minister of Land Reform Flora Buka, has not paid any particular attention to women. Instead, the government has maintained that women's rights lobbyists should have provided the information themselves. "How could we go to collect data on farms that were deeply mired in violence, where most of that violence was against women?" Mgugu responded. She said the violence that has accompanied the government's fast-track reforms - aimed at expropriating commercial farms for the benefit of landless Zimbabweans - was one factor that has frustrated women's efforts to acquire plots. Because of the violence, many potential female beneficiaries of the redistribution programme have been afraid to apply or take up land in the few instances where they had been lucky enough to be approved for resettlement, Mgugu said. She also pointed out that the police have appeared unwilling to help. "We received many reports of rape. Women were asked for sexual favours while at the same time, naturally, they could not stay in places where there were no sanitary facilities," Mgugu said. Activists have also noted the discriminiation against women contained in existing laws. The civic organisation Kubatana said anti-women colonial land tenure arrangements have been perpetuated through the Communal Lands Act of 1982 and the Traditional Leaders Act of 2000. Under these laws, women in communal areas - where most rural Zimbabweans live - are still expected to depend on men for land, denying them tenure rights. Even though Section 16 of the constitution stipulates that every citizen has an equal right to the ownership of property, another constitutional provision, Section 23, has allowed for discrimination against women under customary law. It placed emphasis on customary considerations in the inheritance of land. In traditional Zimbabwean custom, when a husband died, the land he owned was supposed to be passed on to paternal descendants rather the wife of the deceased. "Section 23 of the constitution should be amended to disallow discrimination against women. There should also be clear criteria for the allocation of land to women," Mgugu said.