Given these apparently paradoxical changes between 2014 and 2017, the question must be asked about the extent to which the measures comprising the social capital index are independent of political and economic forces. Certainly the change to increased social capital from 2014 to 2017 occurs against the background of the factors mentioned above, but also against the background of greatly reduced political violence. In fact, political violence has been relatively low since 2008, and hence increased participation may well reflect this rather than anything else. However, it can also be seen that there were differences between the “hi” and “lo” groups. The “hi” group fell between 2012 and 2014, and then rose between 2014 and 2017, whilst the “lo” group showed the opposite trend: the “lo” group rose between 2012 and 2014, and rose again between 2014 and 2017. Since the previous (statistical) study indicated that “hi” social capital was largely a function of rural residence, did these differences reflect the different views of rural and urban women? Were rural women, who are in a majority supporters of ZANU-PF, expressing something positive about the result of the election in 2013 and unaffected by the faction fighting in ZANU-PF? Were the changes in urban women’s responses a function of the increased hardship they were experiencing as the economy declined after 2013? More work is needed here to understand these differences. Access to information can be a critical factor in facilitating agency, and there is frequent comment about the restricted access of Zimbabweans to reliable information, and the possible effects of propaganda on political participation (Chikwana et al. 2004). As can be seen from Figure 3, there is a relative decline in access to most sources of information from 2012 to 2017, except for access to the internet. Figure 3: Access to Information Overall, and unsurprisingly, radio is the most used form of access to information, and thereafter the other forms decline strongly. It is interesting to see the increase in the internet against the decline in newspapers, probably as a consequence of the growth of cell phone technology. Here POTRAZ reports that there were 13,311,223 mobile subscriptions in the second quarter of 2017, and 6,677,531 of these were active.4 The access to new technology may thus explain both the decline in newspapers and in TV, with people switching away from TV to internetbased information and entertainment. 4 60 50 40 54 49 46 38 33 30 30 20 2012 18 16 11 17 15 13 2014 2017 10 0 Posts and Telecommunications Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe (POTRAZ), Abridged Telecommunications Sector Performance Report. Second Quarter 2017. Postal and 9