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Gloria Chikaonda

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Graduate Student Research Funding | 2021 - 2022 Academic Year

Zimbabwean Marriage Reforms: Stakeholders, State Power and the Challenge of Social Engineering

While human rights activists, civil society, and legal practitioners have made repeated calls for the consolidation of the Zimbabwean marriage regime, which is currently disjointed and riddled with holes that leave especially women and children vulnerable, with legislators there struggling to pass the proposed Marriage Bill for several years now. Little work has been done to make sense of the legislative stalemate that faces Zimbabwean legislators - a stalemate that allows for child marriages, property grabbing and gender-based violence against women and girls to continue. This research hopes to trace the development of marriage legislation and highlight marriage as a focal point of political and social organization within Zimbabwean society. It will use a multi-pronged approach drawing on archival data, in-depth interviews, and case analysis.


Gloria Chikaonda, School of Law

gloria chikaonda

Gloria Chikaonda holds a BA/LLB and LLM in Comparative Law in Africa from the University of Cape Town (UCT) and an LLM from Stanford Law School in international legal studies. As a second-year JSD candidate at Stanford Law School and Knight-Hennessy Scholar, Chikaonda researches and writes about legal pluralism and family law in Zimbabwe. Chikaonda has worked as a teaching and research assistant in the UCT Department of Private Law and a Research Fellow for the Centre of Comparative Law in Africa at UCT which carried out research on regional trade integration as well as the social contract in Africa.

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