Zimbabwe: Beyond a School Certificate

by Jacob Chikuhwa

This book chronicles how Zimbabwe's boomeducational and health systems unravelled after independence in 1980 and howexuberance gave way to pessimism. The uncomfortable truth about how socialismlost its way and the dramatic reversal of fortune is told. No jobs were createdfor the school leavers, inflation went up and poverty started to creep in. The1980s actually laid the foundations for the economic problems Zimbabwe nowfaces. Trapped in an ideological commitment to socialist enterprises, policymakers permitted accountability to slip, carried co-operatives further thanthey should have, and pandered to socialist greed with its corrupt tendencies. Beyond a School Certificateexamines the relations between governance and discursive practices in themodern labour the role of institutions of learning and skillsdevelopment, and the brain drain as creative and retrogressive forces in theeconomy; labour laws and the job market in a critical methodology fororganisational research; and the health system and the poverty datum line as ameasurement of the dynamics in industrial development. This is a genuinely authentic analysisbased on statistical data which support the unfolding events in the southernAfrican country. This book is useful for students (and lecturers alike) anddonor agencies wanting to know more about Zimbabwe. Organisations helping tofight the HIV pandemic will also find the book a source of information.

304 pages, Paperback

First published September 29, 2008