ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how Chinyika is building economic self-sufficiency, through activating the community and encouraging the active participation of women. It encourages the people, men and women included, to take charge of their lives and change a negative situation of hunger and starvation into a positive one of food security and financial independence. The Shona in that respect, in Zimbabwe, think of their great ancestral spirits, the mhondoro, who, as founding heroes, first taught them to smelt iron from the rocks and how to grow millet and sorghum. It was in this sense that spiritual belief systems lay at the heart of a prospective Integral Green Zimbabwe. The colonisation of Zimbabwe had the profoundly debilitating effect of an imposed and dominant Western conventional economic system. In fact, meeting attendance and the field days involving demonstrations of ploughing, sowing and harvesting have mostly been led by the Chinyika women.
