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Background
UN Women, grounded in the vision of equality enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations, works for the elimination of discrimination against women and girls; the empowerment of women; and the achievement of equality between women and men as partners and beneficiaries of development, human rights, humanitarian action and peace and security.
Zimbabwe seeks to become an upper middle-income country by 2030. The attainment of gender equality and women’s rights as afforded to all female citizens in the Constitution is critical for Zimbabwe’s attainment of the Vision 2030 goals. The Vision[1] is based on the Transitional Stabilisation Programme (October 2018 to December 2020) and two successive five-year National Development Strategies (NDSs), the first of which has been developed.[2]
The country has signed and ratified the major international and regional gender equality and women’s right commitments. These include the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), the 1995 Beijing Declaration and the Beijing Platform for Action, the Protocol to the African Charter on Peoples and Human Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa, the Southern African Development Community Protocol on Gender and Development, among others.
Closing the political, economic, and socio-economic inequalities between females and males, however, remains one of the country’s major development challenges. The country’s gender inequalities also are situated and compounded by a multi-hazard humanitarian environment which has included three consecutive years of drought, major damage from Cyclone Idai in 2019 and uneven economic reforms. In 2020, the country joined the global community in navigating the COVID-19 pandemic. The effects of the global El Nino have pushed the country further into prolonged droughts and in April 2024, the President of the Republic of Zimbabwe declared a state of emergency as the drought was declared a National Disaster. The country also issued the Drought Flash Appeal (March 2024-March 2025) requesting US$351 million from humanitarian partners to target close to three million people in need.
The World Economic Forum Global Gender Gap Index Report 2024 ranks Zimbabwe at no.52 which puts it in the top 100. The Global Gender Gap Index annually measures the state and change in gender parity in the areas of Economic Participation and Opportunity, Educational Attainment, Health and Survival and Political Empowerment.
Zimbabwe has managed to close gender disparities in education, but a slightly higher proportion of females (27% compared to 23.1% males) continue to leave school due to gender stereotypes and norms that encourage females to marry, unplanned pregnancies leading to marriage and poverty in rural homes where the education of boys is favoured over that of girls. Gender stereotypes and norms also lead to more women who attend tertiary institutions to choose fields of studies that provide career options that balance their responsibilities between jobs and a family.[3]
Agriculture continues to be one of the mainstays of the country’s economy and the 2019 Labour Force Survey shows 11,235,467 in the sector comprising of 56.9% females and 43.01% males. A ZimStat survey to measure SDG 5.a.1 (Proportion of total agricultural population with ownership or secure rights over agricultural land by sex) shows about 45% of the population in agriculture have ownership or secure rights over agricultural land with women constituting a smaller proportion (44.9 percent) than males (45.9 percent), and women constitute more than half (56.4 percent) of the owners or right-bearers of agricultural land.[4] However in terms of agricultural labour, gender disparities emerge with more women in the agricultural sector being in vulnerable employment. Women constitute about 81% of contributing family workers in the sector and females are only 38% of the employees in paid employment in agriculture.[5]
A dedicated National Country Gender Equality Profile (NCGEP) which provides timely and an up-to-date analysis of the progress and challenges towards Zimbabwe’s achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and specifically SDG 5, is one of the strategic priorities of the country’s Ministry of Women Affairs, Community, Small and Medium Enterprises Development (MoWACSMED) as a key source for evidence-based policy making, programming and advocacy by all sectors and stakeholders. It also provides a strong baseline of data for tracking a measurable change in the lives of women and girls in the country. The NCGEP is critical for the development of a more gender-responsive National Development Strategy 2 (NDS2), Country Common Assessment (CCA) and the next UN Sustainable Development Cooperation Framework (UNSDCF).
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