It could be that the traditional role of men as the head of the family comes into play but also that women are not sitting at home but going out of their way to contribute to their household upkeep. Of note from the table above is that respondents are not confident questioning things at group level. This is surprising given that these are people who voluntarily come together to form the very group and the assumption would be that these are people with similar interests and familiar with each other. The implications of the low response on questioning things are far reaching as it filters down to issues affecting the entire community and failure to hold duty bearers accountable. It then becomes legitimate to ask the question whether communities are able to engage with their leaders if they can‘t hold each other to account. Do we have a citizenry that complain privately but afraid to ask questions face to face? This has far reaching implications on policy and the policy making process, and whether there is meaningful participation and engagement. In the rural communities for example, and in some instances in the urban areas, attending community meetings is mandatory and because of this mandatory nature, the ‗engagement‘ process is one way. Jethro Petit refers to ‗empowerment participation‘ as critical otherwise the meetings can quickly become a token exercise or even a means of maintaining power relations. 22 For this to happen there is need for meaningful changes in power relations to facilitate a two-way engagement process. Soliciting support from elder people or local leaders For young people, they have to contend with the effects of exclusion, and they find it very difficult to be recognised by the adult population. A large proportion of youth does not have a well-defined place in society and are vulnerable and dependent23. Being young in Africa is viewed as problematic and there are so many derogatory names that are associated with or used to describe young people in Zimbabwe. Such names include marombe (loafers), zvidhakwa (drunkards), vatengesi (sell-outs)24, resulting in young people not being able to connect with the generation that is in leadership and their contributions at community meetings has been limited. In the context of government failing to create employment through resuscitation of local industries, young people find themselves in the informal sector and in some cases trying out what is now commonly referred as ―maproject” (projects) in a bid to make income. In the rural areas for instance, young people would like their local leaders to ―give them maprojects”. In that they mean the leaders sourcing resources to start up projects in the community such as poultry raring, pig farming, carpentry, etc to get some form of livelihood. A few have started small business ventures and so many of them are operating illegally. Some with ideas have openly received support from ―big‖ people in their political party but others have failed to get funding to get their initiatives off the ground. The local structures are designed to create a client – patron relationship in most communities and every activity can be viewed from that relationship. For example there is connection between politics and employment or making things happen in the community (see Table 10). Even though the average suggests not favouring much to engage politicians, there is a huge number that actually thinks it is Table 10: Influence of Politics, Mean scores25 Male Female 3 Important that pol does 3.3 not 22 Jethro Petit - Empowerment and Participation: bridging the gap between understanding and practice, Institute of Development Studies, Sussex, UK, (2012) 23 Jon Abbink - Being young in Africa: The politics of despair and renewal 24 Marjoke A. Oosterom and Lloyd Pswarayi - Being a Born-free. Violence, Youth and Agency in Zimbabwe; IDS RESEARCH REPORT 79, 2014 25 Males were significantly more politically engaged than females (See Table 2). 14