Homing in on gender and access to tenure

Many women still face discrimination in accessing land, shelter and property rights despite policy and legal reforms. Tenure systems and contexts vary greatly in the different opportunities and barriers they offer to women. Changes clearly need to be made, but a better understanding of the way these complex tenure systems relate to the dynamic roles of women and men is required before the necessary options and impacts of achieving the changes can be fully understood.

Despite broad agreement that laws and policies should not distinguish between men and women, there is limited legislation supporting women’s property rights in many countries, particularly in South Asia and Africa. Even in cases where reforms have recently been achieved, such as Uganda where a wife’s consent is now legally required to undertake transactions on jointly occupied land, translating these into practice has been problematic. Knowledge about legal rights is limited, women and men often uphold traditional gender roles and relationships rather than formal rights and women lack the confidence, information, experience and resources to get what they are entitled to by law. Many women are also excluded from the application of statutory law, such as in Kenya where women may not be legally married, or customary law contradicts new legislation.

In some customary tenure systems women only have access to land, housing and property as daughters, mothers or wives. Many women therefore face the constant insecurity that if the relationship ends they will lose their homes, land and livelihoods. In Lesotho, moves are being made to enable women to own land. However, customary systems of tenure are often more dynamic and complex than statutory systems and though women may have limited access to land through inheritance or purchase, they may have significant indirect access and rights to use these resources through their roles as household managers.

Many women rely on informal markets for housing not only because of inappropriate legislative and administrative frameworks, but also because women, and women-headed households in particular, are among the poorest and most vulnerable in society. Research by Geoffrey Payne and Associates has found that although discriminatory legislation has been removed in Bolivia, in informal housing markets it is traditional patriarchal, rather than legislative, relationships which dominate and the transactions usually exclude women.

Development interventions and land reform can have significantly different implications for women and men. During colonial periods in many African countries the process of formalising and individualising land rights meant that women were increasingly disenfranchised and lost many of their rights. Similarly there are dangers that World Bank promotion of freehold titles, by increasing the costs of land and simplifying bundles of rights, may actually increase barriers to access, and extinguish certain more innovative rights accessible by women, thus further entrenching inequalities.

There are moves within the tenure policy debate towards acknowledging the need to build on intermediary systems. However, developing such systems in relation to women’s access is hard as there is a particular shortage of data on gender specifically focused on urban areas outside of Africa.

Gender-aware legislative reforms are essential, though not sufficient to secure enforceable access to, control over and use of, land resources by women. Other policy recommendations include:

• raising awareness and building grass-roots support for legal changes
• ensuring the active participation of women in the design and implementation of land projects and policy reforms to ensure more detailed understanding of local tenure and gender issues and the gender-specific imperatives and consequences of transforming tenure systems
• increasing women’s skills, knowledge and capacity for mass mobilisation which, as demonstrated by the success of community-led federations such as the South Africa Homeless People’s Federation, can help women to pursue and secure their rights.

Evelyn Mari
Geoffrey Payne and Associates
34 Inglis Road, Ealing Common,
London W5 3RL, UK

T +44 (0)208 992 2683
F +44 (0)208 992 2683

evelynmari@yahoo.co.uk
evelynmari@gpa.org.uk
www.gpa.org.uk

See also

‘A Field of one’s own: gender and property in South Asia’, by B. Agarwal, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995
‘Rights and Realities: Are women’s equal rights to land, housing and property implemented in East Africa?’, by M. Benschop, Nairobi: United Nations Human Settlements Programme, 2002
‘Gender and Access to Land’, FAO Land Tenure Studies No. 4. Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations: Rome, 2002

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