Land Tenure Rights for Women Under Customary Law (original) (raw)

Regional dynamics are rapidly changing, affecting the social structures and therefore land tenure systems. This paper highlights the women’s rights issues in accessing land under dual systems: Statutory laws and customary practices and explores the elements that contribute to the success of women accessing and securing land rights in four countries. The goal is to make the knowledge resulting from the use of a platform, such as the Global Housing Policy Indicators (GHI), accessible on an open source to all land specialists, NGOs, policy makers, governmental agencies, as well as a global audience, including women around the world. The cases presented illustrate various difficulties to secure land tenure for women. The GHI assessment tool finds first hand evidence of the discrepancies between constitutional laws that are mostly gender neutral and the set of unspoken social norms or customary laws that discriminate against women, by way of practices restricting women’s ability to own, inherit or individually use land. These case-studies include two different types of land related gender inequality patterns - namely perceptual and traditional/ religious law systems. Most are considered ‘typical’ gender inequality situations characterised by increasing restriction to access and use of land, marginalization, prejudices and insecurity because of political and economic changes