Informal Cross-Border Traders and Food Trade during the Global Pandemic in Zimbabwe
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The collapse of Zimbabwe’s economy in the 2000s resulted in the country relying largely on food imports from other countries, especially from South Africa. Informal cross-border traders (ICBTs) have become crucial players in the country’s food economy, playing an important role in the importation of food as well as its retail across the country. Cross-border trading also provides employment opportunities to a large number of people in the country, especially women, in an environment of depressed economic opportunities. The paper relies on data from a variety of sources, including surveys by the Southern African Migration Programme (SAMP) as well as document analysis to demonstrate the role played by ICBTs in the country’s food economy. It also assesses how ICBTs were affected by the COVID-19 pandemic and examines their strategies employed to continue their business activities during the time of mobility restrictions. More importantly, it demonstrates how the lack of understanding of the contribution of ICBTs to employment generation and urban food security has led to the adoption of policies and practices that do not accommodate informal food trading in the country’s urban landscape. The paper also discusses how informal cross-border trading (ICBT) and informal food trading in Zimbabwe have changed in the post-COVID-19 period and sets a research agenda on understanding the role of ICBT in the economies of countries in the Global South.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".