Dancing with El Niño: Drought, the State and the Nutritional Welfare of Rural Children in Zimbabwe

This chapter reports on a long-term study of economic and social adaptation among rural households in Zimbabwe.1 One of the major purposes of the study was to assess the extent of stress induced in poor households by relocation to new surroundings, under the aegis of the government’s resettlement programmes, at a time of acute drought in the early 1980s. Both objective and subjective indicators of stress were utilised, but the main objective indicator employed was the extent of malnutrition in children. The study incorporated the premise that tracking the nutritional status of young children over time using anthropometric methods would provide a reasonable indicator of the stress that families were experiencing because of repeated drought. Complementary modules of the study were able to identify the social and economic changes that accompanied alterations in nutritional status.