Remittances, Poverty Reduction and Informalisation in Zimbabwe 2005-6: a political economy of dispossession?

During the multifaceted crisis that has befallen Zimbabwe since 2000 the plight of the peoplehas been manifest in a shrinking employment market, triple or four digit inflation, a sometimedearth of available commodities, rising child mortality rates and falling life expectancy - to theworst female life expectancy in the world - and a governance crisis experienced as politicalviolence, uncertainty and cultural and social isolationism. Many popular and academicpapers have bemoaned and discussed these symptoms of crisis.The fieldwork from which this paper derives, in November to December 2006, was carriedout in the context of the above, just after an exercise in currency renewal, where three zeroswere removed, in a state suffering the excesses of state propaganda and fear. Some of thedata is corrupted by this numeric confusion and fear induced unwillingness to respond tostrangers’ questions. However, the core of the dataset is sufficiently rigorous to suggestimportant validations and new observations which extend the analysis of our 2006 paper onRemittances in Zimbabwe (GPRG, Working Paper No. 45). This paper reaffirms the centralimportance of remittances to household wellbeing, reproduction and even survival. Itprovides new data on the expanding cross-border, non-pecuniary goods economy; data on ashrinking formal sector; an increasing unwillingness on the part of remitters to usecommercial companies, banks or friends and relatives to transit remittances and thus ashrinking institutional base for the political economy of remittances. In other words, relianceon the personal physical carriage of money has grown as trust in other individuals and firmshas shrunk during a period of deep and extended crisis. This serves to arrest any undueromanticism about the ability of an informal sector to emerge in direct compensation andcompetition to an ossified formal sector: all institutions are in crisis and the new informalremittance transfer systems (IRTS) are no exception. However, the resourcefulness ofpeople in crisis continues to astound, despite these activities not resulting in concretised newinstitutions.We conclude that a model of a political economy of dispossession can be drawn around ourempirics to give both a metaphorical and deeper conceptual understanding of this distal,multi-nodal economy of international remittances, which is critical to the survival ofZimbabweans at the current time.