Our research has shown how land reform has driven the growth in small towns, creating new economic linkages in a reconfigured economic geography of the country. No longer are the metropolitan centres and associated manufacturing industries driving growth, as these have declined as industries have collapsed along with the decline of the formal economy in Zimbabwe. Instead, growth is emerging in new places, driven by different sources of economic activity, often below-the-radar and informal.
Although far from being immune, small-scale agriculture and mining in the post-land reform resettlement areas have been less affected by the economic chaos that has beset Zimbabwe over the last 25 years compared to the formal industries that used to dominate the urban economy. The formal economy – of manufacturing, services and so on – has been drastically affected by the combination of hyperinflation, parallel currencies and lack of investment due to lack of international financing, as well as rampant corruption, poor macroeconomic policies and the knock-on effects of sanctions (even if focused on limited numbers of individuals as endlessly repeated, they without doubt have an impact on the investment environment). For this reason, the larger urban areas show significant decline, with a flow of people out of these areas back to rural areas and to small towns embedded in agricultural areas.
As the previous blogs in this short series have highlighted, these small towns have seen significant growth (although this has been uneven, as our cases from Mvurwi, Chatsworth and Maphisa show). The first blog discussed the drivers of growth (mostly agriculture and mining) as well as decline (especially lack of infrastructure and the collapse of particular markets). The second blog looked at particular businesses through a series of cases across five broad areas in the three towns, looking at how these businesses emerged and who is involved. This blog picks up on these two blogs and asks more specifically, what are the links between small town businesses and agriculture?
Farmers in town
One of the most striking features of small towns has been the growth of housing stock through investment from outside. Where has this come from? For Mvurwi, for example, we have rough estimates of the number of stands purchased belonging to ‘farmers’ over recent years. While records do not indicate the background of those registering new stands, those compiling the data have good knowledge of who is involved. Data from Mvurwi Town Council’s Housing Department show that there have been 5539 new stands registered (across high, medium and low density areas) in the last few years and 24% of these were purchased by farmers (mostly from land reform areas, both A1 and A2).
We also have data on investments by farmers in real estate in each of our nearby A1 resettlement sites. Although our last survey dates from some years ago, we can see that even then, farmers were beginning to invest in urban real estate, mostly in nearby small towns. In Hariana/Ruia A/B A1 areas (near Mvurwi) already 16.9% had invested in real estate by 2014. Since then, the percentage will have increased substantially, but we will have to await our 2025 survey for updated information. Meanwhile Luma and Vimbi A1 sites in Matobo 33.3% and 29.4% had respectively invested in homes, mostly in Bulawayo.
As surpluses are generated from farm-based activity (often combined with off-farm income and remittances and mining), these are increasingly invested in real estate, particularly in small towns (but also as is the case in Matobo in larger towns). Over time, land reform smallholder farmers (A1) have graduated from investing in their farms – through first clearing land, then improving building stock, then buying farm equipment and transport – to seeking to invest in off-farm businesses and real estate. The stands purchased may be for relatives or themselves as they commute to the rural areas or as rental properties, which generate income for farmers.
This tie between rural and urban areas is becoming increasingly strong as 20-30% of households have feet in both places, often linked to businesses (from rentals to shops/restaurants, transport businesses etc.). With different members of a household operating across sites, there is gender and age differentiation in who does what where, but also much movement of people (and goods, funds etc.) between urban and rural areas. The result is a new relationship between rural farming areas and especially nearby small towns that contrasts with the old pattern of circular migration between rural and urban areas in the past, where associations with town were often temporary and associated with a job rather than a business, and movements between sites were occasional (coming ‘home’ to the rural areas for holidays, funerals etc.) rather than continuous, with a shuttling to-and-fro across much shorter distances.
Contributions to enterprise turnover from farmers
We asked all those who were the enterprise owners in our case studies across the five business types (see last blog) what percentage of turnover could be attributed to different clients/customers, with resettlement farmers being one category. This was done as a pile sorting exercises, with 100 beans allocated across different categories, resulting in a percentage of turnover, across a total of 16 cases. Clearly these are very rough estimates of turnover, but business owners had a good idea of the distribution and confidently allocated the beans to different piles, even if precise figures from business records were not available. Even though we had uneven numbers of cases across the business types and the case studies were very different, as an indication of patterns, the overall results are certainly interesting.
| % Turnover from: | Mvurwi | Chatsworth | Maphisa |
| N= | 5 | 4 | 7 |
| Farmers/Farmworkers | 57 | 42 | 11 |
| Civil servants | 16 | 7 | 5 |
| Informal and self-employed people | 15 | 24 | 19 |
| Passer-bys/AFM members/schools | 0 | 18 | 12 |
| Miners | 12 | 0 | 47 |
| Diaspora | 0 | 0 | 6 |
Farmers were the major contributor to overall business turnover across business types in Mvurwi and Chatsworth, while miners were the dominant group in Maphisa; although as noted before some of these were farmer-miners, owners of the land where mining was taken place in need of services to support the mining activity (including transport, mechanics, repairs), while others are mokorokoza, usually young men with cash to spend on consumables, as well as food, accommodation and so on. Other farmers from communal areas or A2 farms were not a significant contributor to turnover. Despite there being far more communal farmers than resettlement farmers, they have much less cash to spend as surpluses are smaller. A2 farmers, rather like their white farmer predecessors, tend to spend money outside the area, travelling to shops in larger towns rather than frequenting local businesses. Farmworkers, either from A2 farms or from compounds still within A1 farms were important contributors to turnover in Mvurwi. In both Chatsworth and Maphisa a category of passer-by was identified during the pile sorting exercises. These may have been farmers or any other category, but they were not from the area, and were en route somewhere else, usually stopping on a bus journey. In the past, civil servants would have been the major contributor to turnover in many businesses, but today with civil service salaries worth so little, they have virtually no spending power. Cash that could be spent was electronic and many businesses in small towns do not have ‘swipe# machines.
Being cognisant of all the limitations, the data clearly show the strong linkage between agriculture (and particularly surpluses generated in the A1 areas) and business activity in small towns. In areas with significant mining activity (Maphisa and more recently Mvurwi), mining sometimes trumps agriculture as the source of such turnover, although this varies across types of miner and types of business and much mining of course is coming from land reform areas.
Small town growth and challenges for policy
In sum, land reform – and so increased agricultural and mining activity in rural spaces – has had a major impact on small town growth and business activity. This has important implications for thinking more generally about area-based development, and the importance of rural-urban connections in fostering economic growth.
Across the three towns in different ways land reform has therefore opened up opportunities for growth, with many economic linkages between agriculture and urban business emerging. In our focus groups, many talked about land reform as offering ‘freedom’, especially linked to economic opportunities that are more flexible, open than existed before when ‘whites’ dominated the commercial economy, including in small town setting.
This small town growth has been facilitated by policy moves, such as tobacco floor decentralisation, as well as changes in regulation around mining (or at least their enforcement). There are of course limits to such growth as seen in all sites, but perhaps especially in Chatsworth where the maize-horticulture boom linked to important markets has collapsed, in part through failures to support basic infrastructure (railway, electricity etc.). In Mvurwi, the town’s growth is constrained physically through access to land as urban settlements encroaches on farm areas allocated only 25 years ago as part of the land reform. In Maphisa, the gold boom may have a time-limit, as is often the way with mineral rushes.
As commentators bemoan the state of First Street in Harare, they need to look elsewhere for where economic dynamism is happening. What is happening in small towns and documented in this blog series is often informal, small-scale and quite mobile and fragile, but it is generating income and employment, and so economic growth. The challenge is to scale up, upgrade and consolidate these gains, and this requires new forms of policy support, less red-tape and out-dated regulations and appropriate approaches to taxation that doesn’t stifle innovation and entrepreneurship through imposing taxes on informal and small-scale businesses.
In thinking about area-based territorial development and linking rural and urban spaces within reconfigured economic geography following land reform, there is an urgent need to have some more strategic thinking around how to support sustained growth, through what sorts of complementary state investment and regulation. The organic, informal growth that has occurred to date has happened in a policy vacuum, and with many positive benefits, but what of the next 25 years? This is a major challenge for rural and urban planning and associated efforts around district-level integrated development. Hopefully these findings can feed into a renewed interest in such themes, long forgotten in Zimbabwe’s policy debate.
This is the third in a short blog series prepared by Ian Scoones, Tapiwa Chatikobo, Felix Murimbarimba and others in the field sites. This blog appeared on Zimbabweland.