Land Reform, Growth and Equity: Emerging Evidence from Zimbabwe's Resettlement Programme

Zimbabwe's resettlement programme is nearly twenty years old. The first families were resettled in 1980, just a few months after independence, and the programme has to date resettled over 70,000 families, well short of the target of 162,000 set in the early 1980s. A tension exists over where the programme goes from here. The rhetoric of the 1996 presidential elections, which presented land reform as an urgent task to be finished (the same rhetoric is conspicuous in the run-up to the 2000 parliamentary elections), is confronted by assessments, emanating both from within and outside government, that resettlement is a failure. However, this paper argues that negative assessments of Zimbabwe's land reform are both premature and have used inappropriate criteria. A long-term perspective is taken, incorporating experience from elsewhere in the region, that suggests that any attempt at comprehensive evaluation of the benefits of resettlement in less than a generation is ill-advised. The focus is not so much the programme as a whole but rather the households participating in it. In broad terms, the paper takes the original - largely political - objectives of the programme, which placed great emphasis on welfare and poverty alleviation, and assesses the extent to which these have been met, at least insofar as can be judged from a 15-year, 400-household panel study and comparison with a contrasting group of communal area households. The empirical core of the paper investigates the benefits from resettlement using a set of variables defining income, consumption and welfare at the household level. The paper also addresses a broader development issue: the possibility of simultaneously achieving economic growth and improving the distributional equity of the benefits of growth

Rural Household Studies In Zimbabwe: A Review

Many perhaps most households in rural Africa have grown poorer over the last decade. The World Bank, for example, estimates that by the end of the century the number of people in poverty in Sub- Saharan Africa will have increased by nearly 100 million since 1985 (World Bank 1994). The causes of this impoverishment and the means by which the process can be reversed are thus central issues for policy analysts—in Zimbabwe as elsewhere in Africa. Much has been written about African households, and much policy advice given based on these writings, but little of this advice originates from or is substantiated by empirical evidence. Even in the rare cases where reference is made to empirical data, these data come almost inevitably from either secondary sources or from cross-sectional surveys. Critical examination of whole sets of major issues-such as the impact of the economic and structural adjustment programme, dynamic aspects of poverty, the growth of linkages between the agricultural and non agricultural sectors, and interactions between agriculture and the natural environment—is hampered by unavailability of data appropriate to these purposes