Africa: measures are needed to raise awareness about women’s rights legislation.

Hope you can help, world law staff!

All over Africa, one can now find examples of women negotiating rights to land and associated resources. Women may enter sharecropping arrangements, as documented for Ghana and Ivory Coast. The tendency is for women to try to obtain land individually but this may be difficult.

Women therefore willingly turn to collective appropriation, as a substitute for individual access or to facilitate individual access at a later date. Such collective fields are often promoted as part of projects or by outside agencies.
While women’s choice of fields is restricted, in general they can decide for themselves how they manage the plot. Nonetheless, they many times refrain from actions which may be interpreted as trying to establish a long-term claim to property.

Furthermore, if usufruct rights are temporary, there is little scope to benefit from long-term investment strategies to increase productivity. Moreover, women do not have complete liberty to dispose of the produce as they might wish. They are often obliged to contribute part of the harvest to supplement the household’s food stocks, particularly in years of poor rainfall.

A woman’s matrimonial status and age tend to influence the degree of freedom she enjoys in deciding how the products of her labour are used. An older woman has greater independence in deciding on her enterprises and may even be in a position to accumulate a private store of wealth.

Family and inheritance norms
Most customary inheritance laws try to ensure that family and clan lands remain within the control of the lineage. Thus, they commonly seek to prevent alienation of land to third parties. The most common inheritance systems in Africa are patrilineal, whereby succession and inheritance of property are determined through the male line and normally only sons or other males inherit land from the family estate.

Daughters are prevented from inheriting family land. This is explained by the fact that, on marriage, young women go to live in the house of their husband and become part of another family.

If her children were allowed to inherit land from her natal family, it is argued that there is a risk that the strong community links with the land would become fragmented and weakened. Islamic law, however, where applicable, recognises a woman’s right of inheritance, although her share is usually smaller than that of a male relative.

Some states have sought to improve women’s land rights by adopting family and succession laws that abrogate discriminatory customary norms, provide for community of property over family land, grant spouses equal rights in the management of family land, etc (see for instance, Ghana’s Intestate Succession Law 1985; and Ethiopia’s Revised Family Code 2000).

However, improved succession legislation is scarcely implemented in rural areas where the majority of the women live..

Integrating gender in land policy and legislation
For long, the land policies and laws of African states ignored the gender dimension of land relations. This has often resulted in the erosion or expropriation of women’s land rights.

An example of this is provided by the Kenyan land registration programme started in the 1950’s, which largely resulted in land being registered with male household heads and in an erosion of women’s customary land rights.

In the land policies and laws adopted over the last decade, however, greater attention has been given to women’s land rights. While there have been some achievements, overall gains remain limited, despite the energy invested in advocacy and lobby activities, particularly in countries such as Mozambique, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Tanzania.

For instance, Eritrea’s Land Proclamation of 1994 prohibits discrimination in land rights and protects women’s land rights in succession, marriage and divorce. In Uganda, the Land Act 1998 declares null and void land adjudication decisions denying women access to land ownership, occupation or use.

The Tanzanian Land laws affirm the equality of women’s and men’s land rights and provides for the presumption of spousal co-ownership of family land. The law also renders null and void any customary practices, which discriminate women when it comes to access and use of land.

Within the South African land reform programme, specific attention has been paid to gender, in terms of policy, legislation and practice. Indeed, available data suggests that women constitute a considerable percentage of land redistribution beneficiaries, although these data do not distinguish between women individual beneficiaries and joint beneficiaries.

During the elaboration of land tenure reform programmes therefore, it is important to include women in working committees and to ensure that consultation methods deliberately target women respondents in a way, which enables them to contribute their points of view with confidence.

This may require sustained advocacy and monitoring to ensure that women’s voices are properly heard. In some countries, legislation does provide for women quotas in land bodies, as in the case of the District Land Boards and the Land Committees in Uganda and the Communal Land Boards in Namibia.

Tanzania has similar provisions. However, it is important to bear in mind, questions of the representativeness of women’s groups. In many instances, women’s organisations have been criticised for having an urban bias and being out of step with opinion in the rural areas on whose basis they claim to speak.

In some cases, improvements in women’s land rights have taken place through judicial decisions. For instance, in Nigeria, the Court of Appeal invalidated customary norms providing for inheritance by male family members only and conditioning inheritance by daughters to their undertaking to remain unmarried.

Similarly, in Tanzania, the High Court invalidated a customary norm preventing women from selling land on the ground that it was contrary to the Tanzanian Constitution and to international human rights treaties (see the case of Ephrahim v. Pastory, 1990).

On the other hand, the Supreme Court of Zimbabwe has on several occasions upheld discriminatory customary norms (eg in the case of Magaya v. Magaya, 1998).

Implementing legal provisions in rural areas

Although addressing women’s rights in statutory law is a crucial step, their translation into actual practice, particularly in rural areas, is quite another matter.

Indeed, implementation of women’s rights legislation is extremely limited in rural areas across Africa, due to a variety of factors like lack of information about existing laws, women’s reluctance to claim their rights as a result of socio-cultural factors, and inaccessibility of the institutions to enforce women’s rights.

Therefore, measures are needed to raise awareness about women’s rights legislation. For instance, given the high levels of illiteracy among rural populations and particularly amongst women, non-written means of communication (radio, workshops, peer group and extension work) using local languages, may have to be resorted to inform all stakeholders of the changes in legal rights and their implications. The limited rights to land that women have gained in recent years need to be consolidated and expanded.


Anna Jaspall