Food Vending: Adaptation Under Difficult Circumstances
The respondents discussed in this article depended on food vending as their main source of income. To succeed in this activity requires shrewd marketing and hard work. For the majority food vending was basically a hanging on and coping strategy, offering very limited surplus for investment. Food vending allowed them merely to stay in town while maintaining a foot in their home villages. The paper presents both a descriptive and an analytical account of food vending activities by female heads of households in Masvingo. The officially imposed constraints on food vending demonstrate the existence of competing and conflicting rationalities between male decision-makers and poor women. The inter -connections between food vendors and the formal markets are noted. Journal of Social Development in Africa Vol 15 No 2 2000, pp. 69-92
Rural-Urban Linkages: Masvingo's Double-Rooted Female Heads of Households
This article results from research on female heads of households in a small Zimbabwean city. Urban-rural linkages constituted an important, on-going survival strategy for women in the research sample. Despite my respondents' desire to stay and to source a living in town, most maintained rural linkages in order to cope with various problems in town. Without a foot in the rural area, most women would not have been able to pursue their desired objective of being permanently urban.
The Logic of Cape Verdean Female Headed Households: Social Response to Economic Scarcity
The Republic of Cape Verde, as part of the Sahelian weather system of West Africa, has suffered severe periodic droughts throughout its long history. As a result of both climatic and historic fac- tors, male out-migration has had a strong tradition on the islands, and the sex ratio is sharply imbalanced in favor of women. The majority of the population survives on a combination of subsistence agriculture and public work activities, and many of the farms are managed by women. This paper focuses on a specific type of female-headed household found on the principal Cape Verdean island of Santiago. The single- mother household, which accounts for twenty percent of the farms, dis- plays a set of characteristics not found in many other African descrip- tions. The single-mother household is the poorest of all rural household types as measured by the subsistence indicators of rural society. Moreover, the formation of a single-mother household incurs social stigma and strong religious sanction. Yet, the incidence of this house- hold is high. We argue that the persistence of this social institution is ultimately related to the lack of economic activities outside of subsis- tence agriculture. Once a life in subsistence agriculture is accepted, access to resources is facilitated through family formation.