Research Article | OPEN ACCESS
Surviving on the Margins of the Formal Employment, an Analysis of the Life Experiences of Pensioners in Masvingo Zimbabwe
L. Nhodo, F. Maunganidze, S. Gukurume, W. Nyamubarwa and G. Marimba
Faculty of Social Sciences-Great Zimbabwe University
Current Research Journal of Social Sciences 2013 1:28-34
Received: November 24, 2012 | Accepted: January 11, 2013 | Published: January 25, 2013
Abstract
Without purporting to be a meta-representation of the life experiences of pensioners in Zimbabwe, this ethnographic study reflects on the challenges bedeviling pensioners, using Masvingo urban as the case study. The study therefore examines the challenges faced by the pensioners in Masvingo, simultaneously analyzing the survival strategies adopted by these pensioners to improve their strained livelihoods. The central argument is that the current macro-economic challenges in Zimbabwe have led to a huge strain on the livelihoods of the pensioners as well as economic marginalization, leaving them in a state of abjection, where they are struggling to meet life’s basics such as heath, food clothing and transport requirements. Notwithstanding the constraining effects of the said economic challenges, the treatise opines that these social actors have an avalanche of livelihood assets which they exude as calculative, strategic, rational and reflexive actors to deal with their constraining social environment. The study was grounded in qualitative methodology and unstructured interviews and focus group discussion were used as the main data soliciting techniques. Giddens’ Stracturation thesis and the Sustainable Livelihood Framework were used as the analytical lens for the findings made herein.
Keywords:
Livelihoods, social actors, survival strategies,
Competing interests
The authors have no competing interests.
Open Access Policy
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made.
Copyright
The authors have no competing interests.
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ISSN (Online): 2041-3246
ISSN (Print): 2041-3238 |
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