Executive Summary
This report is a follow-up to the preliminary report produced by the Women’s Trust (TWT) and the Research
and Advocacy Unit (RAU) in early 2014 on the effectiveness of the SiMuka! Zimbabwe, Woman, Get Counted!
Register to Vote! in getting women to register to vote and to vote. This report goes further to note that whilst it
is encouraging to see women turn out to vote in elections, and even more gratifying to see that the turn out can
be strongly increased by woman to woman advocacy, there is always need to conduct a reality check on the
actual process of the election and its outcome. This report investigates whether what happened before, during
and after the elections affects women’s views of the elections and whether this differs for women in urban areas
as for women in rural areas.
The data collected in this study was acquired through the administration of a 66 item interview instrument for
individual interviews. The instrument was developed, building upon and expanding on the questionnaire
developed for the first stage of the study. Enumerators were trained and the questionnaire was piloted,
corrected, and then finalised. The enumerators were deployed into the same Districts as for the first phase, in an
attempt to get a matched sample but the enumerators were unable to easily use the same subjects from the first
phase, until the attempt to get a matched sample was then abandoned and the interviewers concentrated on
getting as large a sample as possible. Except for those aged under 18 years of age, all women willing to be
interviewed were included in the study.
The major findings of the study were as follows:
Regarding experiencing electoral irregularities, rural women reported two significant irregularities with
greater frequency than their urban counterparts. These were witnessing violence against women
candidates and women participating in political violence against other women. Urban women, on the
other hand, reported not finding their name on the voters’ roll with significantly greater frequency than
rural women.
When it came to witnessing irregularities, there were significantly more urban women, who reported this
than rural women with the irregularities such as witnessing people being bussed to polling stations,
witnessing people voting more than once, witnessing people being turned away, witnessing people being
referred to more than one voting ward, witnessing violence against women candidates and witnessing
women in violence against other women.
On whether the elections were “free and fair, rural women felt overwhelmingly that the elections were
free and fair while the urban women did not.
Concerning the question on whether elections were well run, the rural group was unanimous in their
views that the electoral process was well-run, and significantly more so than the urban group, even
though the urban group also had high numbers that agreed with these views.
There was a very strong overall trend in both groups to support women candidates: 94% stated that it
was important to vote for a woman. Most (73%) felt that it was important for political parties to reserve
seats for women, but less than half (43%) felt that women were adequately represented in government.
The peculiar finding was that although rural women felt that the political parties should reserve seats for
women, they also felt that women are adequately represented in government. This is interesting because
this view is actually not supported by the facts as there were fewer women candidates put forward (but
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