Zimbabwe's resettled farmers struggle to educate their children | Alex Duval Smith | Global development | guardian.co.uk

Zimbabwe's resettled farmers struggle to educate their children | Alex Duval Smith | Global development | guardian.co.uk:

Students at a satellite school in Dunstan farm in Goromonzi, 30km from Harare. Photograph: Alex Duval Smith

In the old kitchen at Dunstan farm, desks have been pushed up against the cream-coloured Aga. Children are having a maths lesson. The dining room where black staff served three generations of the Cullinan family is also a classroom. The children have dumped their schoolbags in the grand fireplace before sitting down for their lesson.

A decade after President Robert Mugabe launched a "fast-track" resettlement programme that chased 4,500 white commercial farmers off the land, Zimbabwe's rural landscape has been transformed. The whites who owned vast tracts of land have been replaced by 150,000 black small-scale farmers and their families, creating the need for a rethink in the provision of education and health facilities. Yet western donors to this country that once prided itself on having the best education in Africa are reluctant to support people living on contested land