Zimbabwe faces the large and challenging task of providing adequate housing for her rapidly expanding population. This study aims to analyse and identify urban low income housing policy failures and to provide a foundation for an effective and viable policy based on local experience. The housing and planning standards applied to solve the low income housing problem are questionable. The symptoms of the housing problem have surfaced as inaffordable housing, growing housing deficits inter alia, and the increasing inability to meet the needs of the urban poor. Consequently it is imperative that solutions are found and applied. The study begins by tracing the historical background of the urban low income housing problem before proceeding to examining the traditional built environment. The latter is described in the hope that relevant lessons may be copied from the traditional response to housing provision. Methods and problems of compiling housing need/housing shortage figures are also analysed with respect to their suitability for application in Zimbabwe. The present housing policies are subsequently analysed with a view to identifying policy failures and the relevance of solutions based on indigenous local experience. In that respect, the housing and planning standards currently used in low income housing policy as well as the existing institutions for low income housing finance are examined. In the final chapter, a summary and conclusions, followed by the section on proposals are laid out. Several broad aspects of housing policy are advanced before actual suggestions in an alternative urban development strategy are put forward. The Bertaud Model is employed in the analysis and derivation of suggested house, plot and layout designs. The Plan Evaluation Matrix assists in effecting a systematic choice between generated options. In addition, the final chapter also touches on the relevance of rural development in finding a solution to the urban low income housing problem.

The implementation of Zimbabwe’s Fast Track Land Reform Program (FTLRP) in 2000 generated polarised debates across academia and in the media. Some commentators dismissed the FTLRP as a politically motivated ‘land grab’, which ruined a vibrant agrarian structure and contributed to food shortages. Landless peasants, who were the major beneficiaries of the land reform, were dismissed as inefficient and lacking the skills to work the land productively. However, empirical data gathered across Zimbabwe indicate that the outcomes of Zimbabwe’s FTLRP are diverse and require a nuanced analysis. This thesis explores the outcomes of land reform in terms of its impact on the livelihoods of peasant households who were resettled under the FTLRP. The thesis utilises empirical data to argue that, despite its shortcomings, the FTLRP has allowed peasant households to access land and other natural resources which were previously enclosed under a dualistic land tenure structure which had persisted after Zimbabwe’s independence from colonial rule in 1980. Data gathered in Mhondoro Ngezi District indicate that in the aftermath of land reform, resettled farmers now have access to better quality land and opportunities for employment at mines and through gold panning which have generally enhanced livelihoods. The thesis also argues that the benefits of land reform are broad and go beyond the utility of land as a means of production. Fast track land reform allowed people to recover ancestral lands lost during colonial era forced removals; it also allowed people to be reunited with ancestral graves and other symbols of spiritual significance. Overall, this has helped to address the diverse aspects of land which had remained largely unresolved due to the failure of Zimbabwe’s market driven land reforms of the early 1980s. The thesis is based on a case study of 185 households who were allocated land under the A1 Scheme (villagised model) in the Mhondoro Ngezi District in Mashonaland West Province of Zimbabwe.

It is accepted institutions and the parameters they create are important facets in development planning. Organizations then lobby policy makers and manoeuvre their resources in response to the attendant restrictions, perceived benefits and censures. This paper seeks to examine the formal and informal context of planning in Zimbabwe. Through a series of interviews with civil servants at state, provincial and municipal level the role of the state and its agencies as initiators and guarantors of the various development frameworks post-independence in Zimbabwe-in tandem with a traditional leadership devoid of all but ceremonial powers is examined in the case study of the Private Partnership, Chisumbanje and the ethanol power plant. It is evident that fissures existed as a deliberate act borne out of the Rhodesian elites ideological aspirations of separate development vis a vis land rights, customary and rule of law, these have been exploited by post-independence regimes in pursuit of self-interests. The culpability of the political organization in the deliberate use of archaic exclusionary and disenfranchising legal instruments in complicity with International capitals has manifested in skewed development in local communities. Physical Planning and its noble intentions of sustainable development for the benefit of both individuals and societies and for future generations are systematically politicized rendering it a mere puppet lacking professional legitimacy an epitaph to politics and their pre-eminence in the Zimbabwean planning paradigm

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<p>Land ownership, control and reform have been some of the most contentious issues in contemporary Zimbabwe. The land question has generated a lot of emotional debate and there is a general consensus that it represents a critical dimension to the crisis the country is going through. This thesis intended to offer some insights into the modus operandi and outcomes of land reform in the country.</p>

The nature of agrarian policies and their impact on social and economic change in Zimbabwe's communal areas, are the substantive subjects investigated in this thesis. It is argued that there are strong similarities between post-independence policies and the policies of the 1930 to 1960 'technical development phase' of the colonial era. For instance, the contemporary grazing scheme and internal land reform policies bear a close resemblance to the much resisted destocking and land husbandry policies of the late 1940s and 1950s, when people lost both land and cattle. The thesis explores the reason for these continuities. Use is made in this presentation of the critical theory of Jurgen Habermas. In particular, Habermas' argument that an unnecessarily one-sided process of societal rationalisation has taken place in the modern era, is drawn upon. with the development of the institutions of capitalism and the bureaucratic state, policy actions, such as those considered in the Zimbabwean case, have become dominated by a purposive rationality. This means rural societies are not involved in the formulation of the policies that closely affect their lives. Instead they are viewed ~isp~ssionately from within the state system as ignorant and inclined to act against their own interests. policies, which are imposed upon them, are then evaluated merely in terms of their technical efficiency and strategic success. The full potential of modernisation, Habermas believes, can only be realised if the 'relations of force' that maintain nonreflective forms of thought are broken down, and if purposiverational action is subordinated to decisions reached through unconstrained communication. Such a communicative rationality is essential to the successful reproduction of societies. Applying this perspective to the Zimbabwean situation, it is-argued in the thesis that policy measures will indeed only become more effective in enhancing rural social and economic welfare, if greater dialogue does occur between rural leaders and government agencies. A proviso to this is that the leaders must be accepted as legitimate representatives by their peoples and not merely be those empowered by the state. In validation of this claim, it is shown how the epistemoloqy peasant farmers hold, with regard to the environment and the nature of an ideal land use system, is entirely different from that held by western educated technical experts. For the perspective of farmers is developed upon the basis that the intr ins ic feature of savanna environments is their var iabi 1 i ty, not their normality. Preferred agricultural and pastoral management strateg.ies are therefore adapted to coping with inconsistency and adversity. Critical to such an indigenous farming system are 'key resource' wetland areas, which are productive, if carefully managed, even in dry seasons. Holding that the use of such areas leads to degradation, successive governments since the 1930s have, however, banned their use. Moreover, the high population densities in the communal areas and the inadequate access to land, labour and livestock resources of the majority of households, has led to people being forced to abuse their environment. Through an analysis of the activities of Agritex, the Zimbabwean agricultural extension agency, it is also argued that radical substantive policy change is dependent upon prior structural and attitudinal change within bureaucratic agencies. The psychological as well as material barriers that prevent the improvement of mutual understanding between rural peoples and outside officials require to be breached. In summary, Habermas' critical theory is used to draw attention to the question of epistemology, both in the implementation of policies and in the conduct of research. In social science and social policy, there is a need to move away from the objectifying impersonalisation of positivism towards a ___ ore critical theory of knowledge. The principal concern of such a theory is to tackle social 'relations of force' through a prior recognition and reconciliation of conflicting interpretations of the world. For this to occur, however, requires us all to accept responsibility for the value choices we make, but nevertheless to be aware of the inevitably limited nature of the understanding upon which these choices are based. In this way 'alternative possibilities' for soci~l change in Zimbabwe, as elsewhere, may be realised.

Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Anthropology), March 2017 / In this study, I explore the ways in which legacies of how and where the Zimbabwean liberation war was fought, the landscapes of the struggle, and the violence associated with it were invoked at district and village level by ZANU PF as it sought to instill loyalty, fear and discipline through its supporters and the youth militia. Although they were invoking memories of former guerrilla bases, and the violence often associated with them, the bases set up by ZANU-PF youth militia in 2008 were not established on the actual sites of former guerrilla camps. However, since then, ZANU-PF war veterans in the Zimbabwe National Army (ZNA) have been returning to the actual sites of the 1970s liberation war guerrilla bases in order to teach senior staff the history of the liberation struggle, drawing together former liberation war collaborators or ‘messengers’ who assisted guerrilla fighters during the war, as well as contemporary unemployed ZANU-PF youth. They used these often highly choreographed events to talk about battles during war, to perform liberation songs, and to explain how ancestors assisted them during the struggle. I examine these recent events, and argue that both the establishment of the new militia bases in the post-2000 period, and invocation of the old, former guerrilla bases dating to the Chimurenga period are deliberate efforts by ZANU-PF to make violence, geography and landscapes do political/ideological work by forging political subjectivities and loyalties that sustain its rule. In stressing these continuities between the 1970s guerrilla bases, and their invocation and reproduction in post-2000 Zimbabwe, I am interested in what the base enables and does in terms of the formation of political subjectivities. I aim to show through critical analysis of the political history and local accounts of the second Chimurenga why political subjectivity and the base are important in the re-examination of both the history and the literature on this history. The base allows for a sophisticated reading of political subjectivity in that it was the space through which the grand narrative of the liberation struggle hit the ground, entered into people’s homes, and constituted a complex relationship between political education, conscientisation, freedom and violence. The liberation war base was meant to make people inhabit subjectivities characterized by bravery, resistance, and resilience when fighting the might of Rhodesian army. In the post-colonial context, the base served the purpose of annihilating the kind of rebellious subjectivities inhabited during the liberation war and replacing them with those characterized by fear, pretense, and quietude. This substitution explains the subjectivities that exist in the post-independence rural population and reveals the purpose that electoral violence has served in Zimbabwe’s post-independence period, especially through the base. However people have also engaged with these landscapes outside of ZANU-PF politicking and this has produced critical subjectivities where people challenge ZANU-PF dominant narratives. / GR2018

A thesis submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the degree of Master of Arts in Sociology (Coursework and Research) JOHANNESBURG / The advent of the Fast Track Land Reform Programme influenced a major shift of small scale farmers from subsistence cereal cropping to the commercial growing of tobacco. Smallholder tobacco farmers enjoyed economic prosperity in the tobacco farming sector but that prosperity was short lived. Smallholder farmers face a lot of marketing, production and policy problems within the tobacco farming industry and these problems are increasingly rendering them unproductive. Most smallholder tobacco farmers are entrapped in a ‘vulnerability context’ in which they are exposed to food and income insecurity owing to the problems which they face. However, despite the challenges which they face, smallholder tobacco farmers are largely resilient; they formulate and reformulate their livelihoods on a daily basis in endeavours to cushion themselves against the overwhelming odds. It was against this background that this qualitative study sought to explore the adaptive strategies that are pursued by smallholder tobacco farmers in response to the effects posed by tobacco mono-cropping. This study also sought to examine the factors that influenced the choice of the adaptive strategies that were pursued by those farmers as well as the factors that constrained their adaptive capacity. To meet the aims of this study, a purely qualitative methodology was adopted in which unstructured interviews and focus group discussions with smallholder farmers who were purposively selected were conducted in Hurungwe district. The study found out that smallholder tobacco farmers were highly adaptive and agricultural intensification, migration, and micro-enterprise activities were found out to be the main activities that were pursued by those farmers. The study also found out gender, income levels, educational levels, infrastructure and equipment ownership as the main factors that either determined or constrained the adaptive capacity of those farmers. Based on key findings, the researcher recommended the government and non-governmental organisations to enhance rural people’s education and credit facilities access, ensure infrastructural development in rural areas and encourage peer to peer sharing of vocational skills. / MT2017

A report on a research study presented to the Department of Social Work School of Human and Community Development, Faculty of Humanities University of the Witwatersrand in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts in Social Work in the Field of Social Development, March 2017 / Poverty is one of the biggest challenges that the global community is struggling with. In attempting to address poverty, there has been a tilt towards a microenterprise approach to social development mostly in the global South. The purpose of the study was to explore the role of microenterprises in poverty alleviation and how microenterprises can be optimised as a strategy for poverty alleviation. The primary aim of the study was to explore ways in which microenterprises are contributing to the reduction of household poverty in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe. This was a qualitative study and a multiple case study design was employed. A semi-structured interview schedule was used during interviews with nine participants who had either gone through entrepreneurship or technical skills training and two key informants were selected based on their expertise in enterprise development. Purposive sampling was used to select the participants and thematic analysis was applied to analyse the collected data from all participants. The major findings of this study were that microenterprises have a pivotal role in ensuring basic sustenance, for example basic needs like rent, food, health care and education. All the participants had received business training, however, there still is a disjuncture between business knowledge and application. Challenges that affected participants in the study included lack of machinery, access to credit and lack of a market for their products as indicated in the findings of the study. The participants expressed that microenterprises are a step towards breaking the poverty cycle. The main findings of this study are that microenterprises as a tool in poverty alleviation manages only to afford people basic sustenance, however, it cannot alone be the panacea for poverty reduction, hence it should be seen amongst other interventions in social development. / XL2018