Ethnicity is probably of lesser importance in explaining variable patterns of lone parenthood in Zambia than in the UK, though some variation is associated with diverse matrilineal or patrilineal traditions characterizing various tribal and ethnic groups. A more important dimension of internal differentiation in parenting and household formation is the rural-urban divide, in consequence both of the loosening of cultural prescriptions that has accompanied urbanization and of the impact on families of patterns of rural-urban migration.
Public concern in Zambia is less focused on the adequacy of parenting by single mothers than on the economic viability of female-headed households, and it is in terms of household type rather than mode of parenting that data are typically collected. Figures for the number of female-headed households in the country as a whole vary considerably from one source to another, indicative of methodological problems inherent in their collection and resulting in part from the difficulty of defining or demarcating ‘household’. There may also be slippage in recording all cases of de facto as well
as de jure household heads. Whereas the de facto label may apply to some polygamous households, it increasingly and more importantly applies to situations where a wife has been left to manage— temporarily or on a long-term basis—when her husband migrates to urban areas in search of employment. Some of these cases go uncounted, by appearing to be subsumed within extended kin networks, even though the primary responsibility for household subsistence may rest with the woman. Cases of widows being ostensibly embedded in extended households may also go uncounted, as may those of young unmarried mothers.
In spite of inconsistencies among various sources, there is general agreement that the proportion of households with female heads is smaller in urban areas than in rural areas, 15 per cent as against 23 per cent according to the World Bank sponsored Priority Survey of 1991 (Government of the Republic of Zambia 1993:40). The breakdown of female heads by marital status also differs as between the hinterland and the towns, with lone female parents or household heads in urban areas more likely to be divorced or separated women,11 while those in rural areas are more likely to be widowed (Mwila 1981:6). It follows that lone mothers in towns are likely to be younger than those in rural areas. Female-headed households are among the poorest within the country. The Priority Survey of 1991, covering 10,000 Zambian households, found 70 per cent of female-headed households falling into the category of extremely poor as against 57 per cent of male-headed households—the proportions in both cases are alarming and testimony to the severity of economic hardship weathered by the country throughout the last two decades (Government of the Republic of Zambia 1993). A series of small studies in Northern Province found female-headed rural households typically cultivating smaller parcels of land than those of male heads and suffering from labour and other resource constraints (Geisler et al. 1985:130-1).
Though female-headed households in urban areas are also poor, their situation on average is probably less bleak than that of female heads in rural areas. Migratory patterns leave women in the hinterland particularly exposed to hardship, while traditional forms of kinship regulation have less force in the towns. This means that, when choice enters into patterns of parenting, it is more likely to be exercised within the urban setting by more highly educated women with independent access to income.
Some low-income female-headed households fall within the most vulnerable category, but so too do any multi-couple extended households. Indeed, it is the latter that have experienced the greatest increase in recent years, with the severity of economic conditions exerting pressure on households to absorb additional unemployed adults as well as single siblings and grandchildren (Moser 1994:91), and this counters the easy assumption that the predominant trend in countries such as Zambia is toward conjugal arrangements and the nuclear family.
There is increasing recognition in Zambia, as elsewhere, that effective policy must be informed by the heterogeneity of female household heads or lone mothers (Geisler 1985:7). The situation of the widow with young children, subjected to the much maligned but still common custom of property grabbing, or of the wife abandoned by her migrant husband in the rural areas, may be very different from the graduate in the urban area with a secure and well-paid job. Yet in Zambia, as in many other developing countries, the stark reality is of precious little assistance from public sources for any female household heads, whatever their specific circumstances.