NEWS AND FEATURES ON THE SOLIDARITY 2000 CAMPAIGN IN COPENHAGEN

Zimbabwe

Zimbabwe
No Success In Reducing Marginalisation

No Success In Reducing Marginalisation

By Lewis Machipisa

HARARE, Jun 5 (IPS) - - Zimbabwe has hardly attained any of the goals it undertook at the World Summit for Social Development in Copenhagen in 1995 to reduce marginalisation at the lower end of the social ladder.

In 1995, Zimbabwe was already in an economic mire and since Copenhagen, the southern African nation has actually fallen deeper into poverty and unemployment and the marginalised groups are, in fact, now worse off.

At the time of the Summit, it was already clear that the government had been unable to manage the transition to a structural adjustment economic regime, following a decision in 1990 to embark on the reforms with the support of the IMF and World Bank.

Formally launched in 1991, the economic reform programme included the usual package of adjustment reforms, foreign currency and imports deregulation, currency flotation, diminished spending on social services leading to lower government deficits.

But these polices failed fundamentally. Export earnings did not take off, neither did employment and GDP. Instead Zimbabwe's balance of trade worsened and the deficit and debt grew.

In 1995, the Zimbabwean government conducted a Poverty Assessment Study Survey covering more than 19,000 households in some 670 communities which showed that 61 percent of households were poor and of these 45 percent were very poor. In communal areas poverty was as high as 84 percent.

But ''the current socio-economic crisis shows every sign of enduring, if not deepening, for the medium term, The outlook for most Zimbabwean households and communities is bleak,'' says MS Zimbabwe.

MS-Zimbabwe is a programme under MS-Denmark, working in areas of poverty reduction which is partly financed by memberships of the public in Denmark and mainly by the Danish government ''Zimbabwe is currently mired in an economic, social and political crisis from which it is proving increasingly difficult for government to extract itself.

"This crisis is seen in plummeting standards of living in both rural and urban areas, continuing land hunger for most rural Zimbabweans, sharp declines in social service provision and employment levels, growing fiscal crisis of the state,'' says MS-Zimbabwe.

Real government spending has been cut with regard to the most vulnerable sectors, health, education, housing, job creation and land redistribution.

According to Sidney Mhishi, director of the Social Development Fund (SDF) in the Ministry of Public Service and Social Welfare, while the Zimbabwean government has given the highest priorities to the social sectors such as health and education, there are a number of international and domestic issues that have had a negative bearing on the attainment of the commitments.

These include a heavy foreign debt, unstable world prices of major exports and poor balance of payment support as well as negative impacts of globalisation and international trade arrangements.

''On the domestic scene we have seen high inflation, a shrinking private sector, natural disasters and the unequal resource distribution,'' says Mhishi.

''With the world becoming one big village it is becoming extremely difficult to distinguish between domestic and international issues as they impact on individual countries either directly or by contagion,'' says Mhishi.

''Thus any attempts to assess progress made in implementing the Copenhagen Social Summit should be made in the context of what is happening not only in Zimbabwe but in the global village.''

Mhishi also blames an uneven land redistribution pattern in Zimbabwe where the majority of the population live in arid to semi-arid regions not fit for agricultural farming.

''The issue of land is very central to an economy like Zimbabwe which is agro-based and as such the question of poverty reduction and social security is inextricably linked to a fair and equitable access and ownership,'' says Mhishi.

''The majority of the poor continue to live in overcrowded, marginalised low productive areas with the marginal soils exhausted the majority are struggling to produce enough for subsistence.''

Mhishi argues that given the unstable macroeconomic environment that has prevailed since the inception of economic reforms in 1991, it is inevitable that the incidence of poverty continue to rise. Indeed a number of companies are folding resulting in massive retrenchments instead of job creation.

While the government blames external factors such as the negative effects of globalisation, uncertain markets, uncompetitive local production and periods of drought, MS-Zimbabwe says, it is ''increasingly evident that government lacks the capacity -- political, financial, managerial and moral -- to solve these problems.''

The 1995 figures (when the poverty assessment study was conducted) are now badly out of date, according to a number of researchers currently involved in social sector studies in Zimbabwe.

Real income levels, which had already fallen by a third between 1990 and 1997, dropped in an unprecedented manner in 1998 and 1999. In 1999 households struggled to cope with an annual inflation for foodstuffs of more than 60 percent.

Social sector researchers now estimate that the percentage of poor households as defined by the 1995 study, have risen from 61 percent to more than 75 percent, with sharpest rise in the last two years.

The more pronounced gap between the poor and the rich has resulted in Zimbabwe being classified as ''highly unequal society'' by the UN agency UNCTAD (the UN Conference on Trade and Development).

According to UNCTAD, the richest 20 percent of the population receive 60 percent of the income in Zimbabwe. Only 10 percent of the national income is received by the poorest 40 percent of its people.

The average income of the poorest 40 percent is only one quarter of the average national income. According to a study by the Ethiopia-based UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), only South Africa in Sub-Saharan Africa has a more inequitable pattern of income distribution than Zimbabwe.