While much analysis of land reform has focused narrowly on production (crops, livestock, and markets), this perspective risks overlooking the broader range of activities and relationships that sustain households and communities over time. Social reproduction refers to the maintenance and sustenance of people through care, education, health, kinship and environmental relations. It encompasses the often-invisible work of nurturing children, supporting the elderly, providing food and water, managing illness and maintaining households, all roles disproportionately carried by women.
Placing social reproduction at the centre of our analysis shifts how we understand the outcomes of land reform. Success is not only measured in terms of yields, income, or accumulation but also in whether households can reproduce themselves from one generation to the next. This requires examining how caregiving, education, health shocks, and access to water and energy shape livelihoods. As Ben Cousins points out in the Oxford Handbook of Land Politics, “the character of social reproduction shapes change, but that change is mostly driven by the restless and relentless forces of capital in one guise or another.” The shaping of patterns of accumulation and the success of land reform, however, are vital foci for analysis.
To explore this theme as part of our 25 years after Zimbabwe’s land reform project, we interviewed 27 women of different ages, both married and single (divorced/separated; widowed), and some in polygamous unions, across our A1 (smallholder land reform) sites in Mvurwi, Gutu, Masvingo and Matobo. These were extended interviews, sometimes lasting several hours, that very often touched on sensitive issues and elicited intense emotions. It was clear that our informants wanted to talk about these themes. Very often, their role as women in supporting processes of agrarian transformation had not been taken into account, despite the lip service paid to ‘women’s empowerment’ or ‘gender-sensitive’ development approaches. These core interviews, focusing exclusively on issues of social reproduction, were complemented by around 100 biographical interviews with both men and women, where some of the themes were touched on. These also explored how gender, generation, class, technology and environment intersect in everyday life. Through a very open-ended interview process, guided by some themes we identified beforehand, we explored a huge range of issues. The interview transcripts from our focused sample of 27 women stretch to 67 pages and 44,000 words.
Our interviews explored the following themes: Gendered pathways to land access and ownership; accumulation patterns and gendered work; gendered social roles; changing
cultural norms and patterns of marriage/divorce; everyday caring labour in households; gendered patterns of leisure and women in leadership roles. By analysing themes such as unpaid care work, access to social services, extended family obligations, changing institutions of marriage and inheritance, technological innovation and gender dimensions of leadership and governance, this blog series shows how the hidden labour of social reproduction is central to understanding both the possibilities and limits of accumulation, shaping agrarian transformations in the process.
Social reproduction encompasses the practices, relations and institutions that support daily survival and revitalise communities across generations. In agrarian environments, such processes go beyond wages and markets to include unpaid and undervalued labour, such as food preparation, childcare, livestock care and reciprocal exchange. Important recent literature from the fields of feminist political economy, agrarian studies and social reproduction theory highlights these dynamics (see here, here and here and earlier classics, here and here). These often-hidden forms of labour sustain livelihoods and farming. They also expose inequality as women bear disproportionate care responsibilities while men dominate land and cash crops. In this context, the endurance of colonial legacies in African rural life is highlighted, along with the persistence of outdated calls to ‘tradition’.
Using social reproduction as a framework allows us to move beyond simply material analyses of farming, focusing on production, sales and income. It situates agrarian life in the invisible work of sustaining households, the temporal reproduction of inequality, the reach of institutions and the lived experience of power relations. Together, the seven blogs that follow show how life is made and remadein agrarian communities: through everyday practices, narratives around gendered roles, intergenerational shifts in relationship norms and power dynamics played out in different domestic and organisational spheres.
A focus on social reproduction, therefore, highlights that the story of land reform cannot be understood through a focus on production alone. The interviews demonstrate that households sustain themselves both through processes of accumulation from agriculture and livestock rearing, and through the interwoven practices of caregiving, education, health management, and kinship obligations. These practices are deeply gendered, with women carrying disproportionate responsibilities for unpaid care and reproduction, even as they also play leading roles in farming and accumulation, increasingly so in the larger farms of the land reform areas.
The result is that livelihood success and accumulation patterns are uneven, shaped as much by social reproduction as by production. Families who could draw on remittances, drill boreholes, or access schools and health services are better able to reinvest and expand, while those facing illness, widowhood or caregiving burdens often slide into precarity. Class differentiation, therefore, cannot be separated from gendered and generational patterns of social reproduction. Research must ask how care-giving responsibilities constrain or enable farming; how environmental change reshapes reproductive labour, and how education and health access determine opportunities for accumulation. By centring social reproduction, we can develop a more complete and nuanced understanding of agrarian change and the long-term impacts of land reform in Zimbabwe.
This is the first blog in the series on social reproduction and land reform. The blog was written by Sandra Bhatasara and Ian Scoones, with inputs from Tapiwa Chatikobo and Felix Murimbarimba. The photo was taken by Alport Ndebele as part of the 2025 exchange visit. It was first published on Zimbabweland.