WUASpace Repository
The WUASpace is an open access digital archive which collects, preserves, and disseminates scholarly content produced by the WUA community. WUASpace contains journal articles, book chapters, postgraduate thesis/dissertations, conference papers, pre-prints, working papers, technical reports, progress reports, project reports, among others.
Communities in DSpace
Select a community to browse its collections.
Recent Submissions
Thinking Children’s Rights in Africa: Emerging Issues
(ATF Press Publishing Group, 2025-10-10) Kudzai Mwapaura (Book Review); Isaac Mutelo; Joyline Gwara; Monica Nyachowe
This review critically examines Thinking Children’s Rights in Africa: Emerging Issues (Mutelo, Gwara & Nyachowe, 2025), a multidisciplinary volume that explores the status, challenges, and future prospects of children’s rights across Africa. The book brings together contributions from scholars and practitioners in social work, law, theology, philosophy, and child protection to interrogate the complex interaction between indigenous African values, legal frameworks, and contemporary realities affecting children. Organised into three thematic sections, the volume addresses foundational concepts of childhood and personhood, analyses legal and policy instruments guiding child protection, and examines emerging challenges such as child marriage, substance abuse, street-connected children, sexual exploitation, and other forms of vulnerability. The review highlights the book’s major contribution in demonstrating the compatibility between African cultural philosophies, particularly Ubuntu and communalism, and modern children’s rights frameworks. It commends the editors for providing culturally grounded and empirically informed perspectives that bridge the gap between theory, policy, and practice. The review further notes the book’s relevance to policymakers, researchers, educators, social workers, faith-based organisations, and child rights advocates seeking context-sensitive approaches to child welfare in Africa. While acknowledging the volume’s strengths, the review identifies the need for greater attention to successful interventions and best practices that could inform practical implementation.
Just Joking? Investigating Sexual Harassment in a Departmental Store in Gweru, Zimbabwe
(LWATI, 2010) Chipo Hungwe
This study investigates the reasons for sexual harassment, its nature and policy implications in adepartmental store in Gweru, Zimbabwe. It also analyses the costs of sexual harassment on both theindividual and the organisation. The study is based on a qualitative research conducted betweenJanuary and July 2008. 24 respondents (14 females and 10 males) were studied using semi structured interviews and questionnaires. Results are analysed using the Miles and Huberman (1994) approach to data analysis. Results reveal that contract employment and lack of skills create vulnerability and dependency, a situation exploited by the powerful male superiors who sexually harass their subordinate females. Sexual harassment is institutionalised at Tatenda where management refuses to acknowledge it as a problem. The reluctance of management to craft policies on sexual harassment and grievance procedures added to women’s fear of reporting sexual harassment perpetuates a culture of silence at Tatenda
A Review of the Challenges and Survival Strategies of University Workers during the Economic Crisis: A Case Study of the Midlands State University (MSU) Workers in Zimbabwe
(Canadian Center of Science and Education, 2011-12-01) Chipo Hungwe
This study explored challenges faced by the Midlands State University (MSU) workers and analysed the survival strategies used to deal with the identified challenges during the height of the economic crisis in 2007. Participants comprised 40 teaching and 21 non-teaching workers, of whom 35 were male and 26 female. Data were collected using a questionnaire and participant observation. Data analysis was through the SPSS programme and qualitative thematic analysis. The results revealed that, the six major challenges faced by MSU workers were lack of adequate remuneration, consumables, transport, electricity, office space and economic hardships. The most popular survival strategies to deal with such challenges were fiddling and escaping. The study revealed that most of the coping strategies employed by participants were not means of resisting the university but means of overcoming constraints paused by the university and thus facilitating university business.
Nationhood and Women in Postcolonial African Literature
(Purdue University Press, 2010) Elda Hungwe
Chipo Hungwe
In their article Nationhood and Women in Postcolonial African Literature, Elda Hungwe and Chipo Hungwe, through an analysis of Pepetela's Mayombe, Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, and Ngugi's Petals of Blood discuss nationhood and nation in postcolonial African literature within the framework of the postcolonial theory. Postcolonial theory negates master narratives of nation and nationhood, hence it deconstructs such narratives as problematic. Hungwe and Hungwe discuss problems associated with definitions of nation where groups or members are peripheralized. While Hungwe and Hungwe acknowledge that nationalism served a critical role during decolonization, their conclusion is that in postcolonial Africa notions of nation and nationhood represent problematic issues with regard to ethnicity and gender and that globalization in particular impacts and challenges the notion of nation and nationhood.
The meaning of institutionalisation to older Africans: A case study of a Zimbabwean old people’s home
(Swinburne University of Technology, 2011) Chipo Hungwe
Institutionalisation is foreign to older persons in Africa. It invokes negative feelings on those institutionalised. These negative feelings include those of guilt, neglect and abandonment by relatives, regret and powerlessness. While institutionalisation cannot be avoided especially for destitute individuals, it has depersonification effects, some of which can be avoided if staff at the institution can be more accommodative and some rules changed/repealed to allow the older persons to live respectable existences. The intentional and sometimes calculated exercise of power by staff in determining all the activities of the older persons feeds on to older people‟s feelings of powerlessness. However, since the older persons cannot live without the institution they have to gratefully accept their situation dealing with each day as it comes, waiting for death.