Zimbabwe’s fast-track land reform at 20: exploring disability inclusion and the attendant policy implications

Abstract

This article interrogates disability inclusion two decades after Zimbabwe’s fast-tracked land reform and the associated policy pathways for improving the situation of people with disabilities in an agrarian context. Exploring the country’s land reform through disability inclusion lenses is largely missing in literature and policy. Using disability inclusion and interpretivism as the evaluative conceptual framing and heuristic research approach in a rural district respectively, the article shows that latent and manifest politics of inclusion and exclusion influence people with disabilities’ formal and informal access to land and agrarian support. Accordingly, the article advances the significance of a sturdy transformative agenda that prioritizes this often-sidelined group in the productive, redistributive, reproductive, protective and social compact outcomes of the land reform. This approach tackles the structural causes of marginalization, inequality and poverty in pursuit of generating and sustaining the wellbeing of people with disabilities.