Building resilience to food insecurity in rural communities: Evidence from traditional institutions in Zimbabwe.

Emmanuel Mavhura

doi:10.4102/jamba.v9i1.453

Abstract

Many rural communities that depend on smallholder farming face food insecurity induced by climate-related disasters. In response, some communities are taking the initiative to cope and adapt to climate-related disasters. Using case study material from the Zambezi Valley, Zimbabwe, this article examines how traditional institutions are enhancing resilience to food insecurity in rural areas. The data were collected through interviews and focus groups involving traditional leaders, ward councillors, village civil protection members and villagers selected in the valley. The findings point to how the Zunde raMambo informal safety net, nhimbe form of collective work and the practice of share-rearing arrangement to access draught power help save lives and alleviate food insecurity induced by flood or drought disasters. The study concludes that the three schemes are evidence of community reorganisation or change in response to food insecurity. They are a form of absorptive capacities enabling the community to cope with food insecurity.

Highlights

Resilience is an increasingly common concept throughout a range of research domains, in relation to shocks, economic downturn, climate change, globalisation and environmental disasters (Skerratt 2013; Wilson 2013)
This section focuses on how informal safety nets, collective work and share-rearing arrangement of draught power enhance resilience to food insecurity in rural communities of Zimbabwe
It is abundant and innovative, including informal safety nets, social networks, connections, relationship of trust and other social resources upon which people draw in pursuit of livelihood objectives

Summary

Introduction

Resilience is an increasingly common concept throughout a range of research domains, in relation to shocks, economic downturn, climate change, globalisation and environmental disasters (Skerratt 2013; Wilson 2013). A return to pre-disaster conditions can propagate the conditions of vulnerability that can lead to the disaster (Jordan, Javernick-Will & Amadei 2011) In view of these shortcomings, this article adopts the social-ecological perspectives in which resilience is understood as the ability of a community to recover from disasters through adaptive processes that facilitate the social system to reorganise, change and learn in response to a disaster (Coetzee, Van Niekerk & Raju 2016). This is supported by Cutter et al (2008) who view resilience as the ability of a social system to respond and recover from disasters and includes those inherent conditions that allow the system to absorb impacts and cope with the event. Resilience is conceptualised as a process of transformation and not as ‘buffering’ as this will lead to the reinforcement of existing practices and prevent the questioning of underlying assumptions and power relations

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion