Property Rights

Citation:

Gervais, Myriam. 2004. “Human Security and Reconstruction Efforts in Rwanda: Impact on the Lives of Women.” Development in Practice 13 (5): 542-550.

Author: Myriam Gervais

Abstract:

This paper evaluates the pertinence of interventions sponsored by aid agencies that seek to meet the security needs of women in post-reconstruction Rwanda. Personal security, economic security, and socio-political security are used as the main methodological reference marks and indicators. The information and data used in the paper were gathered during several visits to Rwanda in 2001 and 2002. The study reveals that efforts have brought about positive impacts on the lives of women. However, findings also show that specific strategies aimed at increasing women's security would better benefit them if they were more consistently planned so as to take into consideration the ways in which issues of poverty, gender, and security intersect.

Keywords: women's land rights, women, economic security, socio-political security, reconstruction

Annotation:

• The author examines a sample of initiatives and evaluates how pertinent the interventions sponsored by aid agencies that seek to meet the security needs of women have been. A look at the projects undertaken in Rwanda during the reconstruction period reveals that there were two types of initiatives aimed at supporting women's efforts to respond to the crisis caused by conflict and genocide: the formation of solidarity groups and production associations, and the establishment of advocacy groups and women's collectives. These associations have also taken on the task of providing legal and medical assistance services, forming groups to assist survivors, and providing business advice. The document describes how with the collaboration of local people, some non governmental organisations (NGOs) built houses in various parts of the country and tended to the most needy. By giving priority to the most vulnerable and by making this a condition for funding, NGO projects promoted the taking into account of women's needs in housing programmes. In many cases, women signed individual contracts recognised by communal authorities. The signing of a contract between a woman, the local authority, and the NGO brought about a major change: women and girls were recognised as owners of their homes. The document then considers other issues such as economic security and socio-political security.

​Quotes:

“Promoting human security in post-conflict societies means taking specific actions that support a safe environment, social harmony, equal status, and equitable access to resources and to the decision-making process.” (542)

“Gender-based violence still remains high during reconstruction periods, proving that peace is not enough to ensure women’s security. In many cases, women are also confronted with radically changed realities: they have to assume new roles and new responsibilities at the family and community levels, and in so doing they are more susceptible to new forms of insecurity.” (543)

“Rwanda’s agriculture-based economy was completely destroyed by the war, forcing most of its population to live in a state of extreme precariousness. The food shortages caused by the destruction of crops and the severe reduction in cultivated land was aggravated by the inability of many households to obtain the labour they needed. In 1996, 34 per cent of families—with an average of six to seven young dependants— were headed by widows, unmarried women, and wives of prisoners suspected of genocide…64 per cent  of labour force in basic production is female.” (544)

“It is conventionally considered unacceptable for women to inherit from their families. Since girls who are heads of family enjoy no protection, they live in a climate of permanent insecurity and are vulnerable to attempts at intimidation and sexual assault, particularly at night.”(545)

“Following the genocide, one of the challenges for female heads of household was to secure a cultivable plot of land in order to ensure their family’s subsistence. One frequently observed way of doing this was to join an associative group.” (546)

Topics: Gender, Women, Girls, Gender-Based Violence, Gendered Power Relations, Gender Equality/Inequality, Gender Equity, Genocide, Households, Livelihoods, NGOs, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights, Security, Human Security Regions: Africa, Central Africa, East Africa Countries: Rwanda

Year: 2004

Citation:

Whitehead, Ann, and Dzodzi Tsikata. 2003. “Policy Discourses on Women’s Land Rights in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Implications of the Re-turn to the Customary.” Journal of Agrarian Change 3 (1-2): 67-112.

Authors: Ann Whitehead, Dzodzi Tsikata

Keywords: customary law, land tenure reform, women's land interests, legal pluralism

Annotation:

• This article is unique in that it approaches legal pluralism and customary law from the perspective of women’s movements fighting for increased tenure security for women. The focus on women’s movements allows the authors to present divergent views of the utility of customary law and critiques of its ability to advance the interests of women.  
• Authors argue customary ownership has been eroded since the time of colonialism, “making women's access to land significantly more precarious as the protections traditionally ensured by the clan system have been peeled away." (2) 
• With increased commercialization of land and problems of land scarcity, local leaders have felt pressure to protect the clan system, and in so doing have placed even greater constraints on women's access to land. The article outlines the strategies women have used to respond to the growing interest in preserving customary laws, including land alliances and coalitions.
• Discusses the amendments to the Ugandan Land Law in 2000 and how women’s movements were not successful in their push to include a co-ownership clause in the law. This clause was necessary because current legislation provides limited opportunities for women to own land, but was omitted at the last second: “Thus under customary law, which prevails in Uganda, a woman may have jointly acquired land with her husband and may have spent her entire adult life cultivating the land, but she cannot claim ownership of the property. If he dies, the land generally goes to the sons, but may also be left to daughters. Nevertheless, he may still leave the wife with no land and therefore no source of subsistence." (6)
• Other strategies used: purchase of land, obtaining titles to land, taking claims to courts, and organized collective protest around legislation.

Quotes:

“Rather than seeing customary land practices as a basis on which to improve women’s access to land, they are advocating for rights-based systems that improve women’s ability to buy, own, sell, and obtain titles on land." (2)

“Because women's ties to land are mediated by their relationship to men in patrilineal societies, women's attempts to assert their rights in ways that challenge customary land tenure systems is often perceived as an attempt to disrupt gender relations, and society more generally." (2)

“Women, both rural and urban, have responded to the renewed interest in protecting customary laws and practices through collective strategies, which in Uganda have included a movement to ensure women's access to and ownership of land. Women have also adopted individual strategies of purchasing land and taking their land disputes to court. Purchasing land has, in effect, become a way of circumventing the traditional authorities." (2)

“Heightened protection of customary land tenure arrangements has taken place in a context where the customary and religious laws and practices that have been retained have selectively preserved those elements that subordinate women. These arrangements have included customary divorce and inheritance practices, keeping women as minors (e.g., Swaziland, Lesotho, Zimbabwe), bridewealth, widow inheritance (levirate), dehumanizing rituals pertaining to widows, early childhood marriage, polygamy, and female genital cutting." (3)

Topics: Civil Society, Clan, Coloniality/Post-Coloniality, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Gender Equality/Inequality, Land Tenure, Governance, Households, Political Economies, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Africa

Year: 2003

Citation:

Gupta, Jayoti. 1993. “Land, Dowry, Labour: Women in the Changing Economy of Midnapur.” Social Scientist 21 (9-11): 74-90.

Author: Jayoti Gupta

Keywords: dowry, gender, gender roles, womens rights, women's land rights

Annotation:

• This paper explores the situation of women returning to their homes and communities after their countries have experienced major conflicts. In that context, it assesses the range of barriers and challenges that women face and offers some thinking to address and remedy these complex issues.  As countries face the transition process, they can begin to measure the conflict’s impact on the population and the civil infrastructure.  Not only have people been displaced from their homes, but, typically, health clinics, schools, roads, businesses, and markets have deteriorated substantially.  While the focus is on humanitarian aid in the midst of and during the immediate aftermath, the focus turns to development-based activities for the longer-term.
• Development activities provide a significant opportunity to ensure that gender is central to the transitional process. Here we take gender centrality to be a first principle of response – namely planning, integrating and placing gender at the heart of the development response to conflict.  First, many of the post-conflict goals cannot be implemented when the population is starving, homeless, and mistrustful of government-sponsored services.  Women constitute the overwhelming proportion of refugees misplaced by war; not responding to their specific needs to return home dooms the reconstruction process.  Second, women are central to any socioeconomic recovery process.
• This paper looks at the need to integrate development and post-conflict, and then turns to an analysis of why gender matters.  It then looks at the development as both a short and long-term process, using the model of “social services justice” to describe immediate needs as the country begins the peace stabilization process.  Social services justice serves as an “engendered” bridge between conflict and security, running the temporal spectrum from humanitarian relief through post conflict to longer-term development, any of which is inclusive of transitional justice.  The goal throughout is to respond to the immediate needs of the population post-conflict, ranging from livelihoods to health to education.

Topics: Development, Displacement & Migration, Refugees, Economies, Gender, Women, Gender Mainstreaming, Gendered Power Relations, Livelihoods, Peacebuilding, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Asia, South Asia Countries: India

Year: 1993

Citation:

Federici, Silvia. 2011. “Women, Land Struggles, and the Reconstruction of the Commons.” The Journal of Labor and Society 14 (1): 41-56

Author: Silvia Federici

Abstract:

This article examines the question of communal land property in Africa and its implications for women's land rights. Among the themes discussed are: the reforms of communal land tenure attempted by the World Bank in the 1990s, the critique of communal land relations that feminist organizations have made on account of their patriarchal discrimination against women, and the simultaneous efforts by landless rural and urban women to appropriate unused plots of public land for subsistence farming. While warning that the feminist attack on communal land ownership may strengthen the neo-liberal drive towards the privatization of land, the article looks at women's reclamation of unused public land for subsistence farming as the path to the constitution of new commons.

Annotation:

• The article looks at two kinds of struggle that women are making in Africa that have a direct impact on the future of communal lands. First is the women’s movement that has developed in the 1990s to fight for land rights and which has declared its opposition to customary tenure because of its patriarchalism and discrimination against women. Second, are the struggles of women in urban areas who, in contrast to the prevailing trend toward privatization, take over plots of public land to farm them for their families’ subsistence.

• There is much that we can learn from them as to the interests that are today shaping people’s relation to communal resources and the role that gender issues play in this process. These struggles show that egalitarianism is for commons a question of survival, for unequal power relations within them open the way to outside intervention and expropriation. In particular, they show that gender-based disparities generate dynamics that consolidate the dominance of the market over agricultural relations for they weaken the solidarity between women and men in front of the siege to which the commons are subjected by state business, and international institutions and lead many women to demand a strengthening of the very legal machine upon which land privatization depends. This is a lesson social justice movements need to learn if commons are not to remain pure ideals but are to become an object of struggle. The same movements can learn from the example of the women who instead of turning to the law, opt for direct action, farming on public land, thus subverting the neoliberal attempt to put a monetary gate around all natural resources and reaffirming the principle the earth is our common.

Topics: Feminisms, Gender, Women, Gendered Power Relations, Patriarchy, Land Tenure, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights Regions: Africa

Year: 2011

Citation:

United Nations Centre for Human Settlements. 1999. Women's Rights to Land, Housing and Property in Post-Conflict Situations and During Reconstruction: A Global Overview. Nairobi: United Nations.

Author: United Nations Centre for Human Settlement

Abstract:

The international community is beginning to recognize that women’s lack of rights in, access to and control over land, housing and property constitutes a violation of human rights and contributes significantly to women’s increasing poverty. Despite this important recognition, however, there is little information and research on the application or meaning of these rights in the context of armed conflict and reconstruction, even though women’s rights to land, housing and property are violated on a mass scale during and post conflict situations and regardless of the fact that the violation of these rights during and post conflict has a particularly acute impact on women. In turn, this report synthesizes and analyzes women's experiences across regions in accessing and controlling land, housing and property in the context of armed conflict and reconstruction. It also provides a summary of the central barriers women face in claiming and enforcing their rights to land, housing and property, it delineates the foundation which must be laid to render these rights enforceable, and suggests activities which are required to continue the struggle for women’s rights to land, housing and property.

Annotation:

• This report was prepared as an output of Habitat 1998/99 Work Programme.  It examines recent international recognition of the fact that women’s lack of rights in, access to and control over land, housing and property constitutes a violation of human rights and contributes significantly to women’s increasing poverty.  Women’s rights to land, housing and property are violated on a mass scale during and post conflict situations.  This article synthesizes and analyzes women's experiences across regions in accessing and controlling land, housing and property in the context of armed conflict and reconstruction. It also provides a summary of the central barriers women face in claiming and enforcing their rights to land, housing and property, it delineates the foundation which must be laid to render these rights enforceable, and suggests activities which are required to continue the struggle for women’s rights to land, housing and property.

• Access to land, housing and property is one of the principal factors determining the economic and social well-being of women, especially in situations of conflict and reconstruction, when their rights are violated on a mass scale. The number of women- headed households increases sharply in situations of conflict and reconstruction. Housing becomes not only a place for living, but also working, earning extra income through room rental, or collateral for loans. During reconstruction and rehabilitation, the restitution of land and property usually marginalizes women, leading to social and political instability in the country. Without land, housing and property rights for women, there can be no sustainable peace-building.

• This report includes a general overview of the status of women's rights to land, housing and property outside of the context of war and reconstruction highlighting the fundamental role that rights to land, housing and property play in women’s livelihood and overall living conditions.  Then the article focuses on these rights in the context of conflict and reconstruction, highlighting the additional barriers to these rights imposed on women in this context. The remainder of the article details the conditions that are required for women to claim and enforce their rights to land, housing and property focusing on, education, the role of women's organizations, community action, legal reform, and international campaigns and the current status of women's rights to land, housing and property in the context of conflict and reconstruction.

• The significance of this report lies in its thorough exploration of the relationship between gender and land rights in both pre-conflict and post-conflict situations.  Though it may not necessarily be considered a scholarly source, it is a great starting point towards understanding the topic of gender and land rights and it is fairly integral to conducting further research.  Created by UN Habitat, it is very well-established and its sources are extensive and reliable.

​Quotes:

“Women who return to their homes and lands post conflict either face the same lack of access as they did pre-conflict or, if widowed or if their spouses are missing, they are confronted by male relatives who rely on custom or power to deny and usurp women’s claims to stand in their spouse’s stead.” (2-3)

“In refugee and internally displaced camps, women may have an opportunity to come together, organize and participate in the organizing and running of camp life. These experiences coupled with the discrimination women encounter in the post conflict situation with respect to land, housing and property has resulted in the emergence of women's organizations that are focused on women's livelihood issues including women's rights to land, housing and property. These organizations are instrumental in promoting women's interests so that they appear on the reconstruction political agenda...However, this seldom occurs. Women find that upon returning home, their new roles are retrenched, and their pre-conflict, social roles are reinstated.” (3)

“At the same time, however, armed conflict and reconstruction provide women with new opportunities and roles in relation to land, housing and property that can be the germinating seed for structural change and the realization of women’s rights to land, housing and property.” (31)

“In some countries, refugee and internally displaced women who want to return to their lands and homes are prohibited from doing so if their husbands or fathers die during the war or go missing because under customary law women cannot inherit or own land, housing and property.” (35)

“In these cases women are far worse off than before the armed conflict because even though during times of peace women might not have had legal title to the land and house or could not inherit land or housing, under customary law they were at least granted the right to use or cultivate land and to occupy the house. This meant that they had shelter and access to common lands, such as forest and scrub lands used for grazing which are particularly relevant to women for gathering firewood, fruits and leaves.” (36)

“Beyond the desire to restore normalcy in THE post-conflict situation which means reverting to pre-conflict social norms and traditions, women are finding that political opportunism - rather than support for women’s equality - motivates men to support women’s participation on the battlefield or in peace negotiations. Women are often used as pawns in political bargaining.” (39)

“In post conflict situations, more than ever, most women are preoccupied with survival and basic livelihood issues which are dependent on the immediate realization of their land, housing and property rights...women will have to resort to local justice - which will rely, at least in part, on customary law - as enforced by male elders and traditional leaders.” (44)

“For example, since the liberation war in Zimbabwe, women’s organizations have played a central role in pressuring the government to ensure equality between men and women with respect to land, housing and property matters.” (48)

“There are many obstacles to women organizing in the post conflict situation. Women who had organized, formed associations and were working together in the camps find themselves geographically dispersed upon returning to their respective homes and lands. In turn, they feel isolated, with limited communication with other women in their new communities.” (49)

Topics: Armed Conflict, Gender, Women, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights

Year: 1999

Citation:

Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress. 1998. “Land and Property Rights of Women in Situations of Reconstruction: The Central American Experience.” Paper prepared for the Inter-Regional Consultation on Women’s Land and Property Rights in Situations of Conflict and Reconstruction, Kigali, Rwanda, February 16 - 19.

Author: Arias Foundation for Peace and Human Progress

Topics: Gender, Women, Post-Conflict, Post-Conflict Reconstruction, Rights, Land Rights, Property Rights, Women's Rights Regions: Americas, Central America

Year: 1998