Man’s work morphs into woman’s world

CHEGUTU, Zimbabwe: Donning a blue work suit, matching helmet and cement-spattered gumboots, 32-year old Mateline Mangari heaved a barrow of bricks over the deep mud cratering her Zimbabwean building site. One of two women working alongside a dozen men, Mangari could barely cross the site, a scrap of land near Chegutu farming town in Zimbabwe’s central Mashonaland West Province. Accounting had never prepared her for this. “I have no choice,” she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

“I have looked everywhere for employment and have failed to find any befitting job. So I settled for this construction job after a short course as a brick layer at a local vocational training centre,” said Mangari, a trained accountant. She is one of millions of women taking on the sort of hard, physical jobs once done by men as traditions break under the strain of a failing economy and working men go elsewhere. Building was the only way Mangari could weave a way through Zimbabwe’s chaotic economy and eke out even a basic living.

A third of the nation’s 300,000 construction workers are now women, said the Zimbabwe Building Contractors’ Association. Mangari’s lone female colleague on the Chegutu site, 24-year old Thandi Sibalo, became a labourer two years ago when she felt death had left her with no better option. “While I was in college, training to become a teacher, I lost my parents and my husband in a horrific road accident,” she said. “My husband was responsible for my college fees so his death shattered my dream - and that’s why I’m here.”

Two decades after farm seizures slashed agricultural output and sent investors packing, the country’s official unemployment rate topped 80 percent. In response, men chased opportunities over the border, leaving women to pick up the slack at home. “They (men) migrated in their millions to ... work as laborers on thriving farms in neighboring countries like South Africa and Zambia,” labor relations expert Denford Hwangwa, who works for the government, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation. “Women left behind by their migrating husbands have had to fill up the gaps,” he added.

Making ends meet is hard in a country where inflation hovers near 300 percent, according to the International Monetary Fund. Food prices routinely jump, shortages are rife and opportunities few. Incessant power cuts have cost manufacturers more than $200 million in lost production since June, according to the Confederation of Zimbabwe Industries and Zimbabwe National Chamber of Commerce, darkening the bleak jobs picture. The result is a new generation of working women, with no turning back to the strict, old gender lines, said Thembi Dhlela of Women of Zimbabwe Arise, a women rights organization. “We all have to generate money, men and women, through whatever jobs (are) available,” Dhlela told Thomson Reuters Foundation. “As women, we are breaking those barriers.” Up to a point, said Catherine Mkwapati, a civil society activist. “Women have dived into men’s jobs, but back in their homes, the women still toil on their own, carrying out a litany of ... domestic chores,” she said. — Reuters