Africa Renewal (United Nations)
Mary Kimani
9 May 2008
Felitus Kures is a widow living in Kapchorwa, northeastern Uganda. Her husband's death left her solely responsible for their children.
To meet their needs, she depended on the small piece of land she and her husband had farmed together. But just months after his funeral, her in-laws sold her husband's land without her knowledge. "We only realized this when the buyer came to evict us," Ms. Kures explains. She was able to regain use of the land after she got legal assistance with the help of the Uganda Land Alliance, a civil society group that campaigns for land rights.
Ms. Kures's plight is a common one in Africa, although she was more fortunate than most other women. Many never regain access or rights to matrimonial land lost after divorce or the death of a spouse.
Experts report that women in Africa contribute 70 per cent of food production. They also account for nearly half of all farm labour, and 80-90 per cent of food processing, storage and transport, as well as hoeing and weeding.
Yet women often lack rights to land, notes Joan Kagwanja, a food security and sustainable development officer at the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), headquartered in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Land rights tend to be held by men or kinship groups controlled by men, and women have access mainly through a male relative, usually a father or husband. Even then, women are routinely obliged to hand over the proceeds of any farm sales to a male and have little say over how those earnings are used.
Moreover, such limited access is very tenuous and can be quickly lost. One study showed that in Zambia more than one third of widows lost access to family land when their husbands died. "It is this dependency on men that leaves many African women vulnerable," Ms. Ka-gwanja told Africa Renewal.
In response, activists are fighting to introduce or strengthen laws intended to give women more secure access to land and are combating social norms and practices that stand in their way. Despite many obstacles, they are making headway here and there.
AIDS impact
The spread of HIV/AIDS and the stigma associated with the disease have only made women's land rights more precarious. Widows of men who die from the disease have often been accused of bringing the malady into the family, possibly leading to the confiscation of their land and other property.
As a result, they and their children are frequently forced to survive on society's margins. "They often lose access to land, and [must] get by selling food on the street," says Kaori Izumi, an HIV and rural development officer at the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). "They have no place to sleep. This creates problems of food security."
Such women sometimes lose custody of their children, end up going into sex work or become squatters. And because they are unable to provide for themselves, they become more vulnerable to violence and other abuse. FAO has documented such cases since 2001, adds Ms. Izumi, supporting work on one of the priority issues taken up by the UN Secretary-General's Task Force for Women, Girls and AIDS.
The quality of women's lives can be improved by according them more decision-making power over land, FAO has found. "In Botswana and Swaziland," Ms. Izumi told Africa Renewal, "we found that sexual commerce and other risky behaviour declines dramatically when women have secure assets and property rights. Land and property rights are therefore vital to sexual equality and food security."
Unfortunately, after decades of work, land rights campaigners and UN agencies have scarcely improved women's land rights, notes Ms. Izumi. "We need to take stock of what we know, what has worked, didn't work and why, and come up with a clear road map to secure women's land and property rights."
Historical legacy
Researchers with the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), based in Washington, DC, note that the marginal nature of women's land rights is an historical problem in Africa. Before colonial rule, land ownership and access took diverse forms but were largely vested in lineages, clans and families, with male leaders exercising day-to-day control. Members of a particular lineage or clan would seek rights to use land from those community or family leaders.
A widow and her children in Ethiopia: Unlike most widows in Africa, she has been able to retain control over her small farm.
Except in a few communities where inheritance passed through the mother, land rights were typically only inherited by sons. Women rarely had full rights to land. They were seen as secondary claimants, through male relatives. Before getting married, a woman might have access to her father's land. But in many communities she lost that right with marriage, on the assumption that she would then gain access to the land of her husband or of his family. When a husband died, his land passed on to any sons they might have had or to male in-laws if there were none.
Benjamin Cousins, a researcher for IFPRI, points out that although historically women did not have direct rights over land, they had traditional protections that ensured continued access even after separation, divorce or widowhood. There also were traditional means of arbitration to which women could appeal if access to land was contested.
But the advent of colonial rule led to the introduction of Western systems of land tenure. In East and Southern Africa, the high number of white settlers encouraged the privatization and subdivision of land, held under individual freehold titles. In West Africa much land was left under communal forms of ownership, managed by customary leaders.
At independence, some new governments, as in Tanzania, Mozambique and Benin, proclaimed state ownership over all land. In Kenya and South Africa private ownership existed alongside lineage or clan ownership. In Nigeria, clan and lineage ownership coexisted with both state and private ownership, especially in urban areas.
Over the years, rapid population growth has contributed to the overuse of land and to the depletion of soils. This has made fertile land more valuable and increased competition for its control. Such pressures, together with changes in family structures and clan relations, have eroded traditional social safeguards that ensured some access by women to land. So while many land disputes in Africa are still formally governed by customary law, notes Mr. Cousins, "many protections of women have not been accurately carried forward" into modern life. Moreover, he told Africa Renewal, today there are many situations, such as cohabitation without marriage, to which traditional norms do not apply. Consequently, "Many women have lost access to land."
Dual systems
Many African countries today recognize both "traditional" rules of land ownership and Western-type statutory laws. In Nigeria, the state assumed ownership of all land after independence in 1960. Although this weakened customary land tenure, traditional laws still were recognized by the government in areas of long-established clan and lineage ownership. The recognition of Islamic law in Nigeria's northern states complicated the situation further.
In southwestern Nigeria, notes IFPRI, confusion about which rules to follow enabled rich elites to collude with tribal chiefs to buy up land, which formally belonged to the kinship group, without anyone, especially women, being able to stop it.
Such dual systems of Western and traditional or religious law have often disadvantaged women. A joint study by the UN Development Programme (UNDP) and World Bank in 2000 on gender and agriculture in Africa cited the example of Kenya's Succession Act. The law stipulates that both men and women have equal rights to inheritance. But it also states that if the man dies without a will, the customary law of his group relating to land inheritance will prevail. Since few men write wills and most Kenyan communities do not allow a woman to inherit property from her husband or father, the equality provisions of the Succession Act generally do not apply. In reality, the study argues, inheritance rights for women do not exist.
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