Women's Property Rights

1/05/2009: International consensus is now well-established around the central role of women’s ability to own, inherit and control property in achieving economic development and empowerment. But property rights are often defined through customary & religious laws. (ICRW)

The world now demands that countries guarantee women’s property rights as a key strategy toward achieving gender equality and empowering women more broadly – as stipulated by Millennium Development Goal 3. Laws to protect women’s property rights exist in most countries, and governments are adopting new laws every day. In practice, however, many women still find that they cannot realize their rights.

This disconnect between rights and reality stems primarily from the fact that property rights belong to no one legal arena. Legally, property rights are fixed through various, and sometimes contradictory, bodies of law, ranging from constitutional and land titling law to marital and divorce law. Multiple legal frameworks can create contradictions and confusion in what women’s rights are and which ones should be recognized. Moreover, many of these rules continue to reinforce gender inequities.

Some previous efforts have been made to document progress toward the protection of women’s property rights. For example, the 2000 Progress of the World’s Women report from the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) examined national governments’ constitutional provisions for gender equality and nondiscrimination. Other publications examine legislative frameworks in specific regions or across a specific set of countries. These include a review of 10 sub-Saharan countries by the Centre for Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) and a review of four eastern African countries by the U.N. Habitat Centre. Human Rights Watch and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations have published case studies of legislative frameworks of countries including Kenya, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe.

ICRW built upon these and other resources to compile a database of relevant laws in 102 countries: 51 across the different regions of Africa, 30 from Asia (including the Caucasus region), and 21 from Latin America and the Caribbean.

The assessment covered countries’ constitutions; civil codes and other laws governing family, personal, marital and succession matters; and land and agrarian laws. Due to limitations of time and resources, the information was largely obtained from secondary sources. Therefore, care needs to be exercised in drawing comparisons, since it is possible that a country may have legal provisions that have not been addressed in the secondary literature. Nevertheless, by establishing a framework of core legal protections for women’s property rights, the study is able to broadly gauge the adequacy of a country’s legal protections.

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