Women do much of the work in Zimbabwean agriculture and capture little of its value. They plant, weed, harvest and carry, yet the profitable links in the chain — aggregation, processing, trading, finance — have tended to sit in other hands. At a Women in Agriculture Union breakfast in Harare on 31 March, the call to stakeholders was direct: stop competing for a better price at the farm gate and start controlling the value chain itself.
The Gap: Labour at the Bottom, Margin at the Top
The distinction matters because it reframes the problem. A farmer who only grows is a price-taker, exposed to whatever the buyer offers and whatever the season delivers. The margin accumulates further up — where raw produce is bottled, milled, packaged, branded and sold. To urge women to lead the value chain is to urge them to move from the part of the business that bears the risk to the part that captures the return.
The push for women to take a leading role in agriculture value chains was the breakfast’s organising theme, and it lands differently from a generic empowerment message. It is a structural argument: ownership of processing and aggregation, not just participation in production, is what changes a household’s economics.
Growing is labour; owning the chain is power.
The Hub: Olga Nhari and a Place to Aggregate
Founder Olga Nhari pointed to a Women’s Agribusiness Farm Hub as a concrete answer to the gap. The logic of a hub is aggregation. Individual smallholders are too small to negotiate, too small to meet a supermarket’s volume, too small to justify processing equipment on their own. Pool them, and the numbers change — collective volume to bargain with, shared infrastructure to process through, a single point a serious buyer can deal with.
This is the mechanism that turns scattered production into a market actor. A hub lets a group of women farmers reach the scale that a single farm never can, and it is at that scale that the more valuable links — grading, processing, packaging — become viable to own rather than rent.
Aggregation is how the small become large enough to be paid properly.
The Capital: Funds, a Bank, and the Missing Ingredient
Deputy Minister Jennifer Mhlanga pointed to the financing side, citing the Women Development Fund and the Women’s Microfinance Bank as instruments built to put capital behind women in business. The pairing matters because ambition without finance stalls at the farm gate. Moving up the value chain — buying a mill, building cold storage, financing a season’s aggregation — takes capital that informal lending rarely supplies on workable terms.
Dedicated vehicles like a development fund and a microfinance bank exist precisely to close that gap, channelling credit to operators who are often invisible to mainstream lenders for want of collateral or formal records. The instruments alone do not guarantee the outcome; uptake, terms and reach decide that. But naming them alongside a working farm hub sketches a fuller picture than slogans usually allow — production, aggregation and finance addressed together rather than one at a time.
For the operator reading this in Mutare or Masvingo, the takeaway is practical. The path from price-taker to chain-owner runs through scale and capital, and both now have visible scaffolding in Zimbabwe. The lead is there to take; the question is who organises fast enough to take it.
