Gloria Chikaonda

Chikaonda is a is a 6th-year JSD candidate at Stanford Law School. She holds an BA/LLB and LLM in Comparative Law in Africa from the University of Cape Town and a JSM in International Legal Studies from Stanford Law School. Gloria’s doctoral research focuses on marriage and family law in southern Africa, with a broad interest in legal pluralism and legislative reform. Her work appears in several international publications, including the Journal of Comparative Law in Africa, the San Francisco Chronicle and, more recently the Stanford International Policy Review. Chikaonda is a recipient of the prestigious Stanford Knight-Hennessy Scholars Fellowship (2019 cohort) and a recent Stanford Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow. In her spare time, she works to nurture aspiring African scholars and level global knowledge-production through her organization - the Young African Research Network (YARN).

King Center Supported Research

2026 - 2027 Academic Year | Graduate Student Fellowship

It’s our culture”: Zimbabwean marriage reforms, competing stakeholders and the challenge of social engineering

Since 2013, Zimbabwean human rights activists, civil society, and legal practitioners have been making repeated calls for the consolidation of the Zimbabwean marriage regime. Legislators had been struggling to pass the proposed 'Marriage Bill' since as early as 2010. The Bill was first officially introduced in Parliament in 2017 by Cabinet members, and public hearings were conducted in 2019 by seven teams made up of members of four parliamentary committees. It was intended to streamline the three main types of marriage currently in Zimbabwe (civil, registered customary unions, and unregistered customary unions) into a single comprehensive statute. Girls and women's rights advocates and non-profit organizations were highly invested in the protection of women's property rights, the end of child/forced marriages, the recognition of cohabitation relationships, and other unofficial or unregistered customary unions. Being a largely Christian nation, religious communities were key stakeholders in the reform of the Bill. Traditional chiefs were also vocal about the reform of marriage laws in the country, as custodians of the indigenous cultures of the nation who wanted to preserve the practice of bridewealth. With so many actors at play, the Bill was undoubtedly a controversial subject of legal reform, with party politics (and gendered interests within that) also impeding the progress of the law. Focusing on the period 2013-2022, this project will use a multi-pronged qualitative methodology to track the development of marriage legislation in Zimbabwe and unpack the various socio-cultural factors embedded within the struggle over marriage reform. It seeks to understand more about the institution of marriage as a focal point of legal and social organization within Zimbabwe's contemporary pluralistic society.