The heated debate around Section 25 of the South African Constitution and the principle of “expropriation of land without compensation” is conspicuously missing the inextricable link between land, water, and gender questions. Within former settler colonies, the “land question” is a “water question” and, by extension, also a “gender question.” The racially inequitable land distribution, codified in the Native Land Act of 1913, mirrored the unequal distribution of rights and access to water as codified in the Water Act of 1956. This was compounded by the gender question, in which lack of access to land for women mutated into lack of access to other productive resources. While secondary data analysis reveals that blacks control only 5.8% of agricultural water uses, Black women control less than 1%. Such intersectionality of race, class, and gender ought to remain a relentless focus of transformative social policy in South Africa.

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Serious inequalities in asset distribution in many developing countries consistently remain a key driver of household food insecurity, high unemployment, poverty and, ultimately, rural outmigration. Yet, the employment-retaining capacity of agriculture and its counter to rural-urban, including international, migration has been proven in many contexts. The 2000 land reform programme in Zimbabwe saw between 12 and18 per cent of women gaining access to land in their own right. Using a transformative social policy approach, the article explores the extent to which land reform as a social policy instrument enhanced household food security and rural incomes and opened new employment opportunities for beneficiaries relative to non-land reform beneficiary households. Highlighting the migration-social-policy nexus, I argue for land reform as a restraint to not only rural-urban but also international migration. Data gathered through a mixed methods ethnographic approach, combining in-depth interviews and surveys, and analysed using a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods, indicates that access to agricultural land and water can not only reduce but reverse rural to urban, including economically driven, international, migration. This suggests that continuous agrarianisation, in the Zimbabwean context, remains one plausible pathway to tackle the triple challenges of household food insecurity, unemployment and rural outmigration.

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