Zimbabwean feminism: a status update

Issue #400: Zimbabwean feminism. Women in Zimbabwe want their unpaid housework to be seen, and valued, as real work. Here's how that fight is going.

Also this week: Big week for justice in Syria, a better week for children on social media, Ebola vaccines starting in the DRC, a first-person account of the flood in Nepal, and a Dragon Ball Z theme park.

This newsletter has been edited by Jonathan Ramsay.

Zimbabwe's women want credit for the work they do at home

Refresher: Women in Zimbabwe (and almost everywhere else) for a long time have fought for their housework to be recognized, valued, redistributed, and supported through public policy. This work includes cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes, as well as caring for children, older people, and relatives with disabilities. It can also include collecting water and firewood or growing food. This is often called "unpaid care and domestic work" because it is important but usually unpaid. In 2024, several initiatives, women's rights groups, and female politicians in the country studied unpaid care labor in Zimbabwe, wrote a proposal for a new law, and sent it to Parliament for them to discuss further.

What happened:
The campaign is finally gaining political support. The Women's Academy for Leadership and Political Excellence (WALPE) is leading the push with the Ministry of Women's Affairs and other civil-society organizations.

A major step came on August 20, 2026, when Zimbabwe's National Assembly supported a motion to recognize unpaid care work. MPs called for a national policy, a new law, better public services, and a study to show how much this hidden labor adds to the economy. The motion is not yet a law, but it's definitely been placed on top of the government's agenda.

Why this matters: Zimbabwe's Constitution formally supports gender equality and women's rights. The country has women in Parliament (about 30.1%) and government, and its courts have made important equality rulings, including against child marriage. But everyday life tells a different story. Women still do most of the housework and family care while having less access to land, jobs, money, childcare, water, and electricity. For women in rural areas, the gap is even wider.

Tell me more:
There are some concrete numbers, too. According to a 2025 survey conducted by the state-owned Zimbabwe National Statistics Agency:

• Women spend about 5.9 hours a day on unpaid work, compared with 3.8 hours for men. This broad category includes housework, caregiving, volunteering, and producing goods for the household's own use.
• On housework and caregiving only, women spend about 3.9 hours a day, almost three times the 1.4 hours spent by men.
• Around 90% of women do unpaid domestic work, compared with 52% of men.

Compare: "Women do almost twice as much unpaid work as men per day," says a 2025 OECD report. However, the gap varies a lot. It is relatively small in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, and much larger in Italy, Portugal, Australia and Mexico. According to a 2026 survey in the U.S., women averaged about 2.8 hours, men 2.1 hours.

Good to know: In a wealthy Western household, domestic inequality may mean that the woman performs more cooking, cleaning, and childcare. In rural Zimbabwe, it can additionally mean walking kilometres for water, collecting firewood, and cooking without electricity or modern appliances. The same gender norm is amplified by, well, missing infrastructure. (This is where the Zimbabwean 5.9 hour figure comes in.)

What could make life better for women in Zimbabwe?
Senator Maybe Mbowa, chair of the Zimbabwe Women's Parliamentary Caucus (it was also her who formally presented the proposal to Parliament in December 2025 and asked the other members to discuss it), says those backing the motion want concrete steps to make choressafer andless time-consuming. "It is not that we want salaries. We simply want the government to intervene and reduce the burden of domestic work on women," she told RFI. Campaigners therefore propose measures like better water supplies, solar-powered wells (here's how you build one yourself, in case you're interested), safer cooking methods, and more financial support for families.

Did you know? According to a 2024 UN Women publication, climate disasters make women's unpaid workload much, much worse. Unpaid care work is not only a household or employment issue;...