Abstract: This article presents the author’s personal reflections on his extensive experience of drafting land laws in Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda over the past 14 years. It highlights key legal issues in efforts to improve women’s access to land through the law, and provides a frank discussion of the author’s involvement in translating constitutional, policy and legal provisions into detailed common law legislation that can be consistently implemented to achieve the goal of gender equality in land rights. The three cases discussed represent quite different situations: a relatively high degree of legal clarity and progressive policy and government support for […]
Record Item Language: English
Securing Land Rights for Women
Abstract: This collection of papers on Securing Women’s Land Rights presents five articles relating to eastern Africa. Four of these illustrate practical approaches to securing land rights for women in distinct situations: law-making for women’s land rights (Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda); land tenure reform in practice (Rwanda); women’s rights under pastoral land tenure (Ethiopia); and women’s rights in areas of matrilineal-matrilocal land tenure (Malawi). This article serves as an overall introduction to the subject, reviewing past issues and highlighting new ones, and setting out the shape of a positive, pragmatic approach to securing women’s land rights in eastern Africa. Five […]
Securing Women’s Interests within Land Tenure Reforms: Recent Debates in Tanzania
Abstract: This article is an account of the debates around the recent land tenure reforms in Tanzania. It focuses on the discourses of Government officials, academic researchers and NGO activists on the implications of the reforms for women’s interests in land and the most fruitful approaches to the issues of discriminatory customary law rules and male–dominated land management and adjudication institutions at national and village levels. The article argues that from being marginal to the debates, women’s interests became one of the most contentious issues, showing up divisions within NGO ranks and generating accusations of State co–optation and class bias. […]
The Land Governance Assessment Framework – Identifying and Monitoring Good Practices in the Land Sector
Who Owns the Land? Gender and Land-Titling Programmes in Latin America
Gender-Based Violence and Property-Grabbing in Africa: A Denial of Women’s Liberty and Security
Policy Discourses on Women’s Land Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Implications of the Re-turn to the Customary
Women’s Land Access in Post-Conflict Rwanda: Bridging the Gap between Customary Land Law and Pending Land Legislation
Women, Wives and Land Rights in Africa: Situating Gender Beyond the Household in the Debate Over Land Policy and Changing Tenure Systems
Abstract: The debate over land reform in Africa is embedded in evolutionary models, in which it is assumed landholding systems are evolving into individualized systems of ownership with greater market integration. This process is seen to be occurring even without state protection of private land rights, through titling. Gender as an analytical category is excluded in evolutionary models. Women are accommodated only in their dependent position as the wives of landholders in idealized “households”. This paper argues that gender relations are central to the organization and transformation of landholding systems. Women have faced different forms of tenure insecurity, both as […]