Across rural Africa, land legislation struggles to be properly implemented, and most resource users gain access to land on the basis of local land tenure systems.
Most of the world’s poor work in the “informal economy” – outside of recognized and enforceable rules. Thus, even though most have assets of some kind, they have no way to document their possessions because they lack formal access to legally recognized tools such as deeds, contracts and permits. The Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor (CLEP) is the first global anti-poverty initiative focusing on the link between exclusion, poverty and law, looking for practical solutions to the challenges of poverty.
The effect of HIV/AIDS on Africa and the issues it creates for women in African societies, especially unmarried women, is a difficult one that will not soon go away. These two volumes [ The Land and Property Rights of Women and Orphans in the Context of HIV and AIDS : Case Studies from Zimbabwe, and Reclaiming Our Lives: HIV and AIDS, Women’s Land and Property Rights and Livelihoods in Southern and East Africa: Narratives and Responses] are important and useful additions to the literature of the problem and should be found in academic and research collections dealing with the topic
The present paper seeks to cover the key issues, trends, constraints, challenges, knowledge gaps and policy options on a range of dimensions of land access. Land access is broadly defined as the processes by which people individually or collectively gain rights and opportunities to occupy and utilise land (primarily for productive purposes but also other economic and social purposes) on a temporary or permanent basis.
This paper focuses on legal and institutional aspects of children’s property and inheritance rights in Southern and East Africa. Chapter 2 discusses violations of children’s property and inheritance rights and discusses how the spread of HIV/AIDS has contributed to the violations. Chapter 3 assesses several norms of customary law that aim to protect children’s property and inheritance rights as well as the current practices of customary law that—in the context of the HIV/AIDS pandemic—serve to complicate and limit children’s ability to maintain their rights.
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