A Capability Approach Analysis of Digital Educational Justice in Masvingo District Schools, Zimbabwe

Dominant frameworks for analysing e-learning adoption in developing countries remain tethered to a resource-centred logic: they count devices, measure connectivity, and assess teacher training as though these inputs mechanically produce educational outcomes. This paper argues that such frameworks are not only empirically incomplete but normatively inadequate. Drawing on Amartya Sen's and Martha Nussbaum's Capability Approach, it reframes the analysis of e-learning in Zimbabwean schools around a more ethically serious question: what are learners genuinely free to do with digital tools? Using mixed-methods data from 100 respondents in Masvingo District schools, combined with document analysis and district officer interviews, the paper distinguishes resources from conversion factors, capabilities, and functioning. It identifies three classes of conversion factor deficit—personal (digital literacy and confidence), social (teacher support, peer norms, parental guidance), and environmental (electricity, connectivity, policy)—that systematically convert nominally equal resources into deeply unequal capabilities. The findings reveal a capability shortfall averaging 60 percentage points between theoretical potential and realised functioning, and a distributional injustice in which the 75th-percentile rural learner possesses fewer digital capabilities than the 25th-percentile urban learner. The paper proposes that digital educational justice in Zimbabwe cannot be achieved through resource redistribution alone; it requires capability-sensitive policy that explicitly addresses conversion factors and treats the distributional shape of capabilities, not merely their mean, as a matter of ethical urgency.