Volume 1, Number 3
October 1995

Divorce and Family Structure in a Changing Environment

Bill Kinsey at the Center for the Study of African Economies, Oxford University, reports some findings from a 12-year panel survey of 400 households resettled under Zimbabwe's land reform program. One of the most surprising things they found was that the rate of what the enumerators term "divorce" has trebled in the last 12 years. Assuming that this is not a measurement issue ("divorce" was the most common explanation for a father's absence when their anthropometric measures were to be taken father's anthropometry is notoriously difficult to obtain due to work away from the village or farm, sometimes several days away), Bill Kinsey shares some of his hunches as to why this trend is occurring: structural adjustment, AIDS, and changes in matrimonial legislation. The desperate need for cash under structural adjustment changes the nature of bride wealth (lobola) from a socially bonding transaction to an economic one. In the past, one effectively had a lifetime to pay lobola, but now, if the son-in-law does not pay up under an accelerated schedule, the father takes his daughter and family back home. Under the threat of AIDS, women leave marriages where their husband's behavior threatens the lives of the rest of the family. The easing of the divorce laws may simply have revealed a pent-up demand for divorce that is only now able to manifest itself. Agnes Quisumbing, IFPRI, pointed out that this 12-year panel afforded a unique opportunity to examine the endogeneity of female headship (what are the causes of female headship and how much does it matter for econometric analyses that we always treat it as exogenous?). Sudhanshu Handa, University of the West Indies, reports that, yes, modeling the endogeneity of female headship does matter, at least for her Jamaican microdata set. Watch out for Ashu's forthcoming papers on this topic in the Journal of Development Economics, Economic Development and Cultural Change, and World Development. The final word, for now, comes from Cecile Jackson, who observes a similar pattern of divorce rates in Zimbabwe (in Chivi). The conjugal contract is changing its form and divorce is frequently initiated by women. Cecile found women in environmentally degraded areas to be more autonomous and more effective in reformulating the conjugal contracts in their favor, but asks: do the renegotiated contracts lead to better management of the environment?. She reiterates a common theme: the circumstances that lead to female headship are so varied as to make the category meaningless, at least from a poverty perspective.