GOKWE, Zimbabwe — A one-room home structure made of poles plastered with mud, roofed with a single zinc sheet, with a gaping wooden door stands side by side with a thatched kitchen hut, also made of poles plastered with mud.
46-year old Denford Chagwiza calls this home, where he lives with his family, the children each evening converting the kitchen hut into a bedroom.
This is in Gokwe, in Zimbabwe’s Midlands Province.
In Harare, 25 kilometers east of the Zimbabwean capital, lies Epworth, an urban settlement where 42-year old Hebert Nhari’s two-roomed cabin home, made from planks, is located.
Here, Nhari dwells with his wife and five children.
Chagwiza and Nhari epitomize Zimbabwe’s grinding rural and urban poverty.
“This has been my life over the years and we have become used to it. Food is our daily struggle because crop yields are always poor, owing to droughts,” Chagwiza told Ubuntu Times.
Although Zimbabwe’s cities have been in the past not known to be infested with poverty, many like Nhari have not been spared by the poverty scourge in the country’s urban areas — the same headache for Gokwe’s Chagwiza.
“I live in this cabin with my family and even if it rains we have nowhere to run to because this is our home; I have no job and together with my wife and children at times we get casual jobs to support ourselves,” Nhari told Ubuntu Times.
Even as he is domiciled in the country’s capital city, like Chagwiza’s, Nhari’s children are all school dropouts and they have to spend much of their time idly roaming around their homes’ vicinities.
So, in essence, with poverty-stricken citizens like Nhari and Chagwiza, independent development experts like Jimson Gandari say ‘Zimbabwe now teams with rural and urban poverty.’
According to the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions (ZCTU), more than 90 percent of this country’s approximately 16 million people are unemployed.
Formed in 1981 through the merger of six trade union centers, ZCTU is the primary trade union federation in this Southern African nation.
For civil society activists like Catherine Mkwapati, ‘unlike in the previous years, poverty in Zimbabwe’s rural and urban areas have become common.’
“You can’t tell the difference now; on one hand when you come to Zimbabwe’s town, you are met with slums, even thatched slums and on the other hand when you go to the countryside, you meet similar structures — signs of poverty,” Mkwapati told Ubuntu Times.
Mkwapati is the director for the Youth Dialogue Action Network, a Zimbabwean civil society organization.
According to the Poverty Reduction Forum Trust (PRFT), emerging trends show that poverty in both rural and urban areas here is shooting up.
“Urban poverty has turned to be an emerging reality in Zimbabwe in recent years, but also remains more widespread in the rural areas, with rural and urban household poverty statistics approximately standing at 76 percent and 38 percent respectively,” Judith Kaulem, director at PRFT, told Ubuntu Times.
Founded in 2008 and inspired by the vision of a Zimbabwe Free from Poverty in which every human being lives a dignified, secure and decent life that conduce sustainable human development, PRFT is a civil society organization which seeks to influence the formulation of ‘pro-poor’ policies by conducting research on poverty-related issues and engaging with policymakers.
For Zimbabwe’s rural dwellers like Chagwiza, according to PRFT’s Kaulem, ‘lack of food security and lack of sustained income opportunities in the face of climate change remain key livelihood challenges being faced by the rural poor.’
But, with joblessness haunting urban dwellers like Nhari, Kaulem also said poverty was now an equal menace to Zimbabwe’s rural and urban dwellers.
However, said Kaulem, ‘as statistics show even now, it’s the rural dwellers still suffering most at the hands of poverty.’
To her (Kaulem), ‘poor access to basic services such as food, health, transport, water and sanitation greatly affects the lives of women and children in rural areas.’
“With above 70 percent of Zimbabweans living in rural areas and heavily dependent on agriculture, it remains very important to invest in evidence-based approach to improve rural livelihoods and access social services by all layers of the society,” Kaulem told Ubuntu Times.
In Zimbabwe, inflation hovers above 300 percent, based on statistics from the International Monetary Fund last year.
This, many rural and urban dwellers like Chagwiza and Nhari, have had to contend with, but in vain, and so according to civil society activists like Owen Dhliwayo, ‘poverty lampoons the poor in Zimbabwe from left, right and center whether in cities or villages.’
He (Dhliwayo) is a program officer for the Youth Dialogue Action Network.
Now, as Zimbabwe’s economy teeters on the brink of collapse amid growing urban and rural poverty, civil society activists like Dhliwayo have warned that ‘soon there would be no sanctuary for the country’s rural or urban dwellers.’
Nutritionists like Melody Charakupa working for a top non-governmental organization in Harare said ‘whether in rural or urban areas, challenges like malnutrition have become Zimbabwe’s new foes to contend with.’
In fact, by last year, the UN agency had already piloted a food assistance program in many Zimbabwean poor urban spots like Epworth, home to many like Nhari, one of Harare’s poorest high-density settlements, feeding over 20,000 residents.
As things stand, according to official numbers from the Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency’s Poverty Income, Consumption and Expenditure Survey, an estimated 76 percent of Zimbabwe’s rural households are poor, while 23 percent are deemed extremely poor.
Yet, in reality, rural households have been the worst affected by poverty in comparison to urban households — pegged at 76 percent rural and 38 percent urban households.
The current Zimbabwe Vulnerability Assessment Committee Report has said the number of food-insecure people here last year was projected at 28 percent; apparently, 2.4 million people who were unable to meet their food needs as to the completion of the consumption year last year.
Consequently, the Zimbabwean government last year went on record in the media claiming
that 7.5 million people or half the population would be food-insecure, whether in rural or urban areas.
Yet, the food question is not the only hurdle facing Zimbabweans — accommodation is another headache either in rural or urban areas.
An estimated one in four of Zimbabwe’s urban population, or about 1.25 million people, live in slums, according to the 2014 United Nations data, with the World Bank estimating that Zimbabwe’s urban population, currently numbering about 5 million people, is increasing by two percent annually.
In fact, for many Zimbabwean rural and urban dwellers like Chagwiza and Nhari, living conditions are horrendous, with many of the dwellings built entirely of grass.
According to the UN, a combination of drought and economic demise by last year left 7.7 million Zimbabweans like Chagwiza and Nhari — approximately half the population — hunger-stricken.