Women, Land Struggles, and the Reconstruction of the Commons (original) (raw)
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Diminished access, diverted exclusion: Women and land tenure in sub-Saharan Africa
African Studies Review, 1999
Increasing commercialization, population growth and concurrent increases in land value have affected women's land rights in Africa. Most of the literature concentrates on how these changes have led to an erosion of women's rights. This paper examines some of the processes by which women's rights to land are diminishing. First, we examine cases where rights previously utilized have become less important; that is, the incidence of exercising rights has decreased. Second, we investigate how women's rights to land decrease as the public meanings underlying the social interpretation and enforcement of rights are manipulated. Third, we examine women's diminishing access to land when the actual rules of access change.
2021
Despite their key role in agriculture, in many African regions, women do not have equal access to or control and ownership over land and natural resources as men. As a consequence, international organizations, national governments and non-governmental organizations have joined forces to develop progressive policies and legal frameworks to secure equal land rights for women and men at individual and collective levels in customary tenure systems. However, women and men at the local level may not be aware of women's rights to land, and social and cultural relations may prevent women from claiming their rights. In this context, there are many initiatives and programs that aim to empower women in securing their rights. But still very little is known about the existing strategies and practices women employ to secure their equal rights and control over land and other natural resources. In particular, the lived experiences of women themselves are somewhat overlooked in current debates a...
Journal of Agrarian Change, 2003
This article examines some contemporary policy discourses on land tenure reform in sub-Saharan Africa and their implications for women's interests in land. It demonstrates an emerging consensus among a range of influential policy institutions, lawyers and academics about the potential of so-called customary systems of land tenure to meet the needs of all land users and claimants. This consensus, which has arisen out of critiques of past attempts at land titling and registration, particularly in Kenya, is rooted in modernizing discourses and/or evolutionary theories of land tenure and embraces particular and contested understandings of customary law and legal pluralism. It has also fed into a wide-ranging critique of the failures of the post-colonial state in Africa which has been important in the current retreat of the state under structural adjustment programmes. African women lawyers, a minority dissenting voice, are much more equivocal about trusting the customary, preferring instead to look to the State for laws to protect women's interests. We agree that there are considerable problems with so-called customary systems of land tenure and administration for achieving gender justice with respect to women's land claims. Insufficient attention is being paid to power relations in the countryside and their implications for social groups, such as women, who are not well positioned and represented in local level power structures. But considerable changes to political and legal practices and cultures will be needed before African states can begin to deliver gender justice with respect to land.
Women, Culture and Africa’s Land Reform Agenda
Frontiers in Psychology, 2018
Pre-colonial Africa prides itself on adherence to diverse cultural affinity and traditional belief systems, which defines the place of women in respect to land access, use and ownership. Land resources continue to play important roles in both agrarian and industrial societies; thus the absence of effective land management and gender construction in land allocations has deepened gender inequality, restricted women's capacity building and agricultural development in Africa. This article explores the impact of traditional African practices and cultural beliefs on women's land ownership and use, and also reconciles women's land rights (access and control) with the realities of land reform in post-colonial Africa. It explores how gender inequalities, in terms of land ownership and rights, have jeopardized attempts at agricultural productivity and sustainable development in Africa. However, it is tasking to 'universalize' African culture and locate it in a center, due to the diverse cultural values found in Africa. However, there are certain belief systems that run through most African communities, such as the denial of women's land rights and the patriarchal nature of societies. Thus, the article found that, despite the development of legal frameworks that expand women's property rights, cases of cultural impediments to the exercise of land rights abound in Africa.
Oxford Development Studies, 2002
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 wives and in their relations with wider kin, as landholding systems have been integrated into wider markets. These cannot be addressed while evolutionary models dominate the policy debate. The paper draws out these arguments from experience of tenure reform in Tanzania and asks how policy-makers might address these issues differently.
Improving Access to Land and strengthening Women's land rights in Africa
2013
The need to improve access to land and strengthen women's land rights in Africa has elicited a lot of discussion with women's rights activists arguing for increased access and control over land and other productive resources. The paper examines inter-relations between women’s land rights and socioeconomic development, peace and security and environmental sustainability in Africa. It goes on to highlight the impacts of the discrimination against women with regard to access, control and ownership of land and identifies promising practices related to strengthening women’s land rights with possible benchmarks and indicators to track progress made in strengthening women’s land rights in the context of the implementation of the AU Declaration on land. It concludes by providing concrete recommendations on how to further promote dialogue, advocacy, partnerships and capacity development in support of women’s land rights in Africa. This paper is as a result of a study commissioned by ...
Large-Scale Land Acquisition as Commons Grabbing: A Comparative Analysis of Six African Case Studies
Haller, Tobias; Adams, Timothey; Gmür, Désirée; Käser, Fabian; Lanz, Kristina; Marfurt, Franziska; Ryser, Sarah; Schubiger, Elisabeth; von Sury, Anna; Gerber, Jean-David, 2019
This contribution is concerned with the challenges of securing women's rights to land in Africa in the context of contemporary land deals through a discussion of three distinct but interrelated problems in the framing of women's land rights discourses. First, this study discusses the interface between rights and "custom" to highlight the inherent distortions of African customary law. Second, it argues that liberal formulations of the law are limited by a set of assumptions regarding women's position in the political economy. And third, this discussion discursively assesses the debates in the literature regarding the efficacy of law in protecting women's rights to land. The discussion proceeds from a critique of two approaches to promoting gender equity in land tenure systems: the institutional approach, which deals with women's formal land rights; and the political economy approach, which deals with the structural nature of women's traditional relations to land.