Conclusions The findings support the more general picture about social capital outlined in the brief overview: the association between social capital and interest and participation is positive. The most interesting finding is that Social Capital, as we have defined this, is a property of the rural areas and rural women. This replicates other studies on active citizenship. Interestingly, urban women are associated with access to information, and no other measure of participation. This too replicates other recent research (RAU. 2016 (a); RAU.2016 (b)). It is good to bear in mind, however, that the components of Social Capital here may well reflect aspects of rural life that are not necessarily voluntary. Attending a community meeting, belonging to a community group, and not being careful what you say in public could also be associated with some of the compulsory aspects of rural life, and may also be associated with political party affiliation. For example, attendance at community meetings called by traditional leaders may not be wholly voluntary, nor at meetings called by ZANU-PF. Furthermore, liking neighbours of a different ethnicity may also be different in the relatively more homogenous rural setting. Nonetheless, the rural and urban differences are marked, and need more careful investigation. They may also indicate differences that should be taken into account when planning interventions for women. It is worth noting that not all urban women will live in low Social Capital environments, neither will all rural women live in high Social Capital environments. Thus, it is important to partial out the contribution that Social Capital itself makes to participation. As seen in Table 2 (above), the higher the Social Capital the greater the political participation, agency, the support for democracy and political trust. This supports the general theory, and not merely in an associational manner. The hypotheses are all confirmed, save that high Social Capital does not lead to a greater in interest in information. This last may not be entirely accurate however, as a socio-economic factor may be a confounding variable: access to information is both a feature of economics and access generally. Poorer women, and rural women, will certainly have less access to both newspaper and the internet, and possibly even television. Overall, it seems safe to conclude that Social Capital leads to greater participation, but there must be reservations about the finding that this will be necessarily greater in rural rather than urban women. It also seems the case that there are too easy assumptions about the possibilities for engaging urban women in the collective life of the country. On these findings, urban women seem to have less agency than their rural counterparts, and hence any attempt to foster their agency will need to understand more carefully their inhibitions and the barriers. It may well be, as has been found for middle class women (RAU.2016 (a); RAU. 2016 (b)), that this will require different strategies, and strategies that take into account the very different lives of urban women. 13