This lesson brief explores the struggles women face in benefiting from their customary rights. It is part of the Uganda module on the Focus on Africa: Land Tenure and Property Rights online educational tool.
The toolkit has been created in order to introduce indigenous women, and the organisations which represent them, to the African system of human and peoples' rights. It highlights the different routes available to ensuring that the rights of indigenous women are valued and taken into account by the African Commission.
The toolkit is comprised of 11 Information Notes:
Strengthening women's inheritance and property rights can be an effective means of decreasing poverty and increasing gender equality, and thereby accelerating progress towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This paper presents two case studies from Rwanda and Ethiopia to illustrate the potential impact that advocacy, legislative reform and law enforcement in this area can have on the achievement of the MDGs in developing countries.
This study documents women’s aspirations in relation to land in Kibaale district, Uganda. The study was designed to identify the gaps between those aspirations and the current reality, the actions required for their achievement, and the implications of those actions. Based on qualitative methods of data collection and analysis, information was gathered from 60 women belonging to the two villages, Nyanacumu and Kanywamiyaga, in the sub-county of Muhorro in Kibaale district. Researchers used appreciative inquiry, participant observation, narratives, focus groups, photos and video recording.
The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) - currently ratified by 187 countries - is the only human rights treaty that deals specifically with rural women (Art. 14). Adopted in 1979 by the United Nations Generally Assembly, entered into force in 1981. The Convention defines discrimination against women as follows:
In 2004, FAO, IFAD, and the International Land Coalition (ILC) jointly published a report on progress towards the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), with respect to the status of rural women. This report provided an historical background to CEDAW and its Optional Protocol (OP 1999) as well as an overview on land issues as reflected in the reports submitted by States Parties.
In the experience of GROOTS Kenya, HIV-positive widows are often thrown out of their matrimonial homes, their land grabbed by in-laws as they are blamed for their husbands’ deaths and/or feared to die within a short period of time. Due to a lack of awareness on land rights, as well as the importance of retaining legal documents to lodge court cases, the ability of widows and orphans to control land and other family assets in Gatundu district is threatened.
The importance of land to poor people’s livelihoods cannot be over emphasized. Land provides the foundation upon which people construct and maintain livelihoods. Consequently, secure access to land is a prerequisite for securing livelihoods. Women are the majority of the poor as they have limited access to social and economic resources. This increases their dependence on basic resources like land. The majority of women rely on a land based livelihood mainly as subsistence agricultural producers.
This lesson brief examines the ways in which women's rights groups collaborated and engaged in the land law reform process in Tanzania. It is part of the Focus on Land in Africa: Land Tenure and Property Right online educational tool.
Hunger and poverty are, in general, consequences of inadequate and restricted access to land and other resources, such as capital, inputs and technology; being women among those with less access to land, while accounting for a large share in small-scale food production.
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