the rural labour force, but to what extent does women’s influence extend beyond this, and how do they see this. It is also the case that urban women, and especially middle class women, eschew participation is socio-political life, except perhaps going to church and belonging to a church organisation (RAU. 2017; RAU. 2016 (a); RAU. 2016 (b)). This is an important relationship, however, for this association provides an inhibition against political violence (Bhavnani & Backer. 2007). A previous examination of active citizenship and social capital in Zimbabwe, using the Round 5 (2012) data, but not disaggregated by gender, social capital was measured using only indicators of trust, intimate trust and institutional trust (RAU. 2015). Both measures of trust were strongly correlated with rural but not urban residence and with affiliation to ZANU-PF. The wider range of variables that are assumed to operate within social capital, such as membership of voluntary organisations or engagements with community agencies, for example, were not included in this study. Furthermore, social capital was not examined as a independent variable. This was the focus of this research: to examine social capital in women and the ways in which this might affect their political participation. Methods For this study, we used the data from three rounds of the Afrobarometer surveys Round 5 (2012), Round 6 (2014), and Round 7 (2017). After cleaning, the three databases were combined into one overall data-base in Excel and then analysed in SPSS (version 20). Constructing a measure of Social Capital The first problem to be solved was to construct a measure of social capital. Using indicators from other studies (Onyx & Bullen.2000; Vyncke et al. 2012), a list of six questions used in Rounds 5 (2012), Round 6 (2014), and Round 7 (2017): Round 5: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. How often felt unsafe walking in neighbourhood Attend a community meeting Join others to raise an issue Member of voluntary association or community group How often careful what you say Trust neighbours5 Round 6: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 5 How often felt unsafe walking in neighbourhood Attend a community meeting Member of voluntary association or community group Join others to raise an issue How often careful what you say Like, dislike or not care as neighbours: people of different ethnicity The equivalent questions from Rounds 6 and 7 was not asked in Round 5, so we chose the closest question to these. 8