Hoping for a new future

I've come to a very rural constituency in Matabeleland, south-west Zimbabwe, an area with a terrible history.

In the early 1980s, factions in the newly independent Zimbabwe fell out and a unit of North Korean-trained troops came and killed large numbers of people. It’s something that hasn’t been forgotten.

But since the downfall of Robert Mugabe, things have started to change over the last nine months.

For many years, the election process has not been free or fair, but this time around it's been marked by how peaceful it's been.

Opposition groups have been able to campaign in rural areas and not been beaten as they were in the past.

But we don't know how people here are going to vote. You might assume they're going to vote against Zanu-PF but that isn’t necessarily the case.

The key thing steering people's decisions is the economy.

Of the 900 or so people who are registered to vote here, two-thirds are women. There are very few men of working age as they have left they for neighbouring countries because unemployment is so high.

And these are the issues here: this idea of trying to acknowledge what happened in the past and move forward, plus how to take this country on and grow its economy again.