|
Back to Index
Zimbabwe:
People's development agenda in 2009
Afrobarometer
August
01, 2010
Download
this document
- Acrobat
PDF version (234KB)
If you do not have the free Acrobat reader
on your computer, download it from the Adobe website by clicking
here.
http://next.pls.msu.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=28&Itemid=104
For many Zimbabweans,
life in the last few years has been nasty, brutish and sometimes
short, but there is now a flicker of light at the end of a dark
and long tunnel. Things started really falling apart in 2008 with
the unprecedented cholera outbreak that claimed more than 4 000
lives and infected over 100 000 others. Zimbabwe stood at the edge
of a precipice with health centres and schools closed, shops displaying
empty shelves, acute shortages of food and other basic essentials,
and rampant politically-motivated violence and human rights violations.
Then in February 2009 a coalition government (dubbed the Inclusive
Government (IG)) was formed, consummating a Global
Political Agreement (GPA) signed in September 2008 by the Zimbabwe
African National Union-Patriotic Front (ZANU-PF) and the two Movement
for Democratic Change (MDC) formations. The Afrobarometer Round
4 survey on which this bulletin is based was conducted in May 2009,
three months after the installation of the IG. Below we present
the findings.
The
Afrobarometer
The Afrobarometer
is a comparative series of public attitude surveys on democracy,
governance, markets and living conditions. The survey is based on
a randomly selected national probability sample of 1200 respondents
representing a cross-section of adult Zimbabweans aged 18 years
or older. A sample of this size yields a margin of error of ±3
percent at a 95 percent confidence level. All interviews are conducted
face-to-face by trained fieldworkers in the language of the respondent's
choice. Fieldwork for the Afrobarometer Round 4 survey in Zimbabwe
was undertaken between May 9 and 23, 2009.
Most
Important Problem: First Responses Only
Among other
things, the May 2009 survey sought to find out what the people felt
were the "most important problems facing this country that
government should address." Respondents could give up to three
responses in their own words; no options were read out to them.
We assume that people would first give their most important problem
(MIP) before offering a second or third response. The various open-ended
answers were postcoded by the interviewer and ranked in order of
importance. The results amount to a Zimbabwe: People's Development
Agenda in 2009 Copyright Afrobarometer 2 people's development
agenda. Figure 1 below presents the hierarchy of problems based
on first responses. At the top of the agenda is management of the
economy, mentioned by a quarter (26%) of the adult population, no
doubt reflecting the parlous state of the economy, which is yet
to recover from the ravages of mismanagement in the last decade.
Economic management has dethroned food shortages/famine, which was
ranked as the most burning issue in a Round 3 Afrobarometer survey
conducted in October 2005. Unemployment and education were each
a distant second, tied at 12% each, and food shortages/famine was
not far behind, mentioned by one in ten respondents. With the country's
unemployment at an unprecedented 94% and most schools having been
closed for a long time, these findings were perhaps to be expected.
Download
full document
Please credit www.kubatana.net if you make use of material from this website.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License unless stated otherwise.
TOP
|
