Traversing the Environmental Push Factors to the Zimbabwean Migration into Southern Africa from 2000 to 2025: Implications to School Leadership

Zimbabwe started implementing the Fast-Track Land Reform in February 2000 when the Mugabe government took most of the farms from the four thousand white farmers who had held them since the colonial era to redistribute them to the blacks. This triggered a plethora of migrations all over the globe, with the mainstream of the migrants housed in South Africa, Botswana, Mozambique, and Namibia, regionally. This current qualitative desktop study used Zimbabwe as a case to explore the environmental push factors prompted by the land reform implementation, and how education has been affected. The environment, as a push factor, has been ignored in the Zimbabwean turbulence discourse; arguably, Jared Diamond explicitly reveals that even in the early 1500s, the major determinant of the collapse of the kingdoms was the environment. The findings indicate that the land reform programme was the chief cause of the environmental-related migrations of Zimbabweans to Southern Africa and globally. These factors prompt migrants to seek economic refuge, better living conditions, health care, access to resources, and relief from various pressures. The study concludes that the worst is not yet over, as the situation continues to deteriorate, with migration still on the high. The paper recommends that the Zimbabwean government and people take proactive initiatives to fix the environmental policies, demographic, social, health, economic, political, and governance factors to arrest the exodus, thereby restoring education. This can be achieved by employing Indigenous Knowledge Systems, Ubuntu philosophy, decoloniality strategies, case studies on African solutions for African problems, and wide stakeholder consultations. The study contributes literature on the land reform programme in Zimbabwe and how it prompted high migration rates, affecting families and educational provision.