Binga folk: The forgotten lot

Water is the most sacred thing we left behind,” says 70-year -old Simpango Munsaka of Binga’s Gande area, in Matabeleland North Province.
“Our leaders are trying to solve our problems without bothering to visit us or listen to us,” says another Binga village elder, Magoyela Mudenda.
When the Zambezi River was dammed and Lake Kariba established in 1957, little compensation was given to the 57 000 local people known as the Tonga who were displaced by the development.
Now, 54 years later, the subsistence farmers, whose population has since more than trebled, still complain bitterly of the sacrifices forced upon them, which have left them with nothing but hardships.
According to the villagers, Government promised to resettle the people immediately following the construction of the 282km long Kariba dam but did nothing.
Instead, they were deposited in haphazard locations and left to fend for themselves.
“The distance from the lake makes it difficult to find water to drink let alone any for farming and because of the considerable distance from the lake, we are unable to fish. In fact, finding adequate food is a major problem,” says 68-year-old Judas Mwiinde, of Musambakaruma area in Nyaminyami District, in Mashonaland West Province.
Ironically, both Binga and Kariba districts have a wealth of natural resources which offer a number of development options.
Yet past governments ignored these resources to the detriment of the local population.
For example, while electricity generated at Kariba is of tremendous benefit to the country and national economy, the over 45 000 villagers in Kariba’s Omay communal lands still do not have access to electricity.
The unavailability of water, electricity and telephone facilities have negatively affected the economic growth of the area.
So, while it is ironic that the Tonga have not benefitted from the resources of Lake Kariba, their former waters for many people elsewhere in Zimbabwe, the waters provide luxury, offering tourist attractions and, of course, electricity.
The Binga and Kariba example shows the disparities in gender and energy. Gender and energy have become one of the latest buzz words in development work.
While mainstreaming gender has become obligatory in most development interventions for sustainability and the fight for gender rights, energy has been the “forgotten arena”.
This is largely because energy interventions focus mainly around electricity which has traditionally been viewed as a gender neutral technology. But in reality, women use electricity quite differently from men.
Everyday, people encounter a mix of activities that occupy most of their time in doing or delivering the outputs of those activities.
This applies to individuals, families, villages and even countries engaging in livelihood and economic activities.
People are constantly dealing with problems they face or trying to fight poverty in a world fraught with denied access, marginalisation and competition for resources.
Within this scenario, energy increasingly becomes a critical input.
And, energy services of sufficient quality, quantity and mix will be a necessary though not a sufficient condition for meeting those basic needs in people’s lives.
For example, when delivering water through a pipe, the energy service which is required to do this can be extracted either from a solar pump or a manually driven pump through human effort.
The decision of which one technology to use will be guided by the objectives to be met from such an initiative. This will require a given combination of two or more forms of energy to deliver clean water to the end user. Keeping vaccines cool will require refrigeration services and again the choice of which can be either an electric or a gas powered refrigerator.
In addition, access to modern forms of energy services that can deliver the services and products wanted by the people more efficiently is increasingly becoming critical in wealth creation and is important in poverty reduction. Poverty is seen, for example, as the lack of access to services such as energy that help people access livelihoods from their environment and create sufficient wealth to solve other, more demanding challenges they face.
Lack of energy is both a contributor to increasing poverty and a result of people being poor.
The problem of poverty is closely intertwined with the lack of modern energy services for the majority of rural and urban populations for both productive uses and social welfare, leading to a perpetual vicious cycle.
Traditional biomass fuel is the commonest source of energy in Zimbabwe upon which the majority of rural and some urban sections rely on. This energy resource does not contribute to meaningful productive use at local level and its continued use locks people in a poverty cycle.
Its unsustainable exploitation and use has been attributed to being one of the major causes of environmental degradation through deforestation, as much as the contribution of land clearance and overgrazing.
Poverty has serious negative implications for the environment since the poor while protective of their lands, also tend to degrade the same land while trying to assure their subsistence.
Lack of availability of firewood puts pressure on women and children and also heightens their vulnerability.
Energy services do have a gender face.
As with many developing countries, gender disparity is very evident as part of the energy problem in Zimbabwe.
In rural areas, women outnumber men 100 to 70, according to national statistics.
They also provide the bulk of the energy balance in the national energy supply matrix. Lack of access to modern energy services continues to keep women locked in drudgery and other difficult tasks that further marginalise them.
Currently, Zimbabwe uses grid electricity derived from coal – fired power stations and the Kariba hydro power plant.
Due to financial challenges, the country cannot sustain adequate delivery of electricity, hence the need to import from neigbouring countries such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Mozambique and South Africa.
The country’s generation capacity has outstretched itself, leading to the frequent power deficiencies.
The thermal power stations are currently in need of urgent refurbishment, requiring vast amounts of capital, which the country does not have.
Even worse, coal is a heavy polluter of the environment. As a result, renewable energy could be the solution.
In Zimbabwe, modern energy services are the result of combining various technologies, infrastructure, labour in the form of expertise and a given primary energy.
They therefore deliver benefits that are valued in meeting social needs and the development agenda.
In terms of the delivery of energy services, many people in Zimbabwe are yet to be served or are so severely underserved and this affects mainly women who are in the majority in such areas.
The majority of the underserved and the unserved live in the rural areas, which have historically been neglected by planners and policymakers. The urban and peri – urban areas pose a special challenge and opportunity in that they have relatively high population densities.
Rural communities are often expected to embrace energy choices and policies that are formulated in Harare within the confines of projects management blueprints.
Development planners tend to see their mission as altruistic and often short circuit the processes of consultation because they perceive the end as justifying the means.
Communities are often so eager to see small changes in their lifestyles that they adopt projects and later find that they do not satisfy their strategic needs.
‘’Energy planners should seek to involve communities and local authorities in all stages of planning,” says Lasten Mika.
He is the Programme Team Leader (Improving Access to Infrastructure Services) with Practical Action Southern Africa, an international technology based non-governmental organization.
The development organisation runs energy projects, that are best suited to serve remote and often isolated in rural areas of Malawi, Mozambique and Zimbabwe.
Access to electricity in these rural areas remains low (Malawi, 0.05 percent, Mozambique, 0.7percent and Zimbabwe 19 percent due to prohibitive costs of extending national grid electricity. This is severely curtailing essential value addition economic activities such as agro processing and light engineering in the rural areas.
Lack of access to modern energy services is a major obstacle to the delivery of socio-economic services such as education and health; all prioritised in the three countries’ poverty reduction strategies.
According to Mika, energy schemes can be designed to address the major issues concerning access to modern energy services by communities and take gender issues into account in the process.
He said methodologies to allow this have been developed by his organization, especially the development of a toolkit for analyzing gender aspects in planning a project.
“The new view of energy supply must of necessity address a number of indicators that enable the value of an energy scheme to be assessed.
“The more traditional approach often looked only at the supply side and saw this as the panacea to energy supply problems with very little linkage to the end uses of the energy services provided,” said Mika.
To this end, Practical Action Southern Africa has established the Gender and Energy Network of Zimbabwe.
This is a networking initiative which intends to engender energy access issues and empower women by bridging the gap between men and women on issues of energy.
GENEZ seeks to achieve this through raising awareness on the relationship between gender and energy, lobbying and advocating for policy reforms in line with gender issues. GENEZ is affiliated to ENERGIA which is the umbrella organization at international level.
“GENEZ membership is made up of institutions, individuals and government ministries. Membership is basically based and driven by interest – anyone with a passion on issues to do with gender and energy,” says Reginald Mapfumo, the Practical Action Southern Africa Gender Liaison Officer.
Although energy is not the solution to all development challenges, it plays a central role in catalyzing rural development.
Meanwhile, effective policies can help pave the way to a sustainable energy future and better economic and social prospects for millions of energy poor people in Zimbabwe.
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