Institutions and the Gender Land Gap: A Comparative Analysis

List of Tables. List of Figures. List of Boxes. Foreword Anne F. Stenhammer. Acknowledgements. Introduction Govind Kelkar and Maithreyi Krishnaraj. Part I. Land Rights for the Farming Women in Asia. 1. Policy Formulation, Law Reform and Women's Property Rights in South Asia Savitri Goonesekere 2. Gender Asset Gaps and Land Rights in the Context of the Asia-Pacific Region Rajini Menon and Preet Rustagi 3. Gender and Productive Assets: Implications for Women's Economic Security and Productivity Govind Kelkar. Part II. Farmers' Relationship to Land and Livestock. 4. Women's Ownership Rights and Access to Land in Bangladesh Sadeka Halim 5. Women's Land Rights in China: An Unpromising Future Wang Yunxian 6. Gender and Productive Resources: Nepal's Case of Landownership Ganesh Gurung 7. Women's Land Use Knowledge and Entitlement in Swidden Agriculture Govind Kelkar and Lily Wangchuk 8. Rules and Norms in Women's Access to Productive Resources: Ponds in Bangladesh Dev Nathan and Rownok Jahan 9. Gender and Livestock in Nagaland Rosemary Dzuvichu 10. Mal Chhe to Mobho Chhe: Livestock is Dignity for Us Lalji Desai. Part III. Women's Entitlement to Land and Productive Assets in India. 11. The Status of Indigenous Women and Land Rights in Jharkhand Samar Bosu Mullick 12. Land, Livestock and the Rights of Women in Rural India N. C. Saxena 13. Women's Entitlement to Land and Livestock inMatrilineal Meghalaya Patricia Mukhim 14. Changing Context of Women's Entitlement to Land in Gujarat Meera Velayudhan 15. Women's Landownership in Gujarat: What has Worked and What Needs to be Looked At! Sejal Dave 16. Women and Land Rights in Maharashtra Seema Kulkarni 17. Resistance and Struggle for Survival: Access, Control and Ownership of Poor and Dalit Women to Land in Andhra Pradesh V. Rukmini Rao 18. Women's Entitlements to Land: Grassroots Strategies for Legitimising Claims Nitya Rao. About the Editors. Notes on Contributors. Index

In recent years, efforts to reduce HIV transmission have begun to incorporate a structural interventions approach, whereby the social, political, and economic environment in which people live is considered an important determinant of individual behaviors. This approach to HIV prevention is reflected in the growing number of programs designed to address insecure or nonexistent property rights for women living in developing countries. Qualitative and anecdotal evidence suggests that property ownership may allow women to mitigate social, economic, and biological effects of HIV for themselves and others through increased food security and income generation. Even so, the relationship between women's property and inheritance rights (WPIR) and HIV transmission behaviors is not well understood. We explored sources of data that could be used to establish quantitative links between WPIR and HIV. Our search for quantitative evidence included (1) a review of peer-reviewed and “gray” literature reporting on quantitative associations between WPIR and HIV, (2) identification and assessment of existing data-sets for their utility in exploring this relationship, and (3) interviews with organizations addressing women's property rights in Kenya and Uganda about the data they collect. We found no quantitative studies linking insecure WPIR to HIV transmission behaviors. Data-sets with relevant variables were scarce, and those with both WPIR and HIV variables could only provide superficial evidence of associations. Organizations addressing WPIR in Kenya and Uganda did not collect data that could shed light on the connection between WPIR and HIV, but the two had data and community networks that could provide a good foundation for a future study that would include the collection of additional information. Collaboration between groups addressing WPIR and HIV transmission could provide the quantitative evidence needed to determine whether and how a WPIR structural intervention could decrease HIV transmission.

In August 2005, a campaign was initiated in Kutch District, Gujarat, India, to obtain government land for landless families. Kutch Mahila Vikas Sangathan (KMVS), a grassroots collective of rural women, supported women's land and property rights in the context of the campaign. In this article, we assess the impact of this campaign on women in Kutch, given that the applications for land were filed either in their own names or along with their menfolk. Land is yet to be handed over to the families, yet the process of claiming it has, in itself, clarified women's views about the relative importance of property rights for their lives and position in society. The process of discussion that KMVS initiated has also provoked some of the women to take a first step in owning property by speaking up within their families.

The Struggle for Equal Adulthood: Gender, Race, Age, and the Fight for Citizenship in Antebellum America, by Corinne T. Field. Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 2014. xiii, 243 pp. $32.95 US (paper). To the discussion of belonging and exclusion in the United States, Corinne Field brings a new perspective that considers childhood as a construct deployed by adults for social and political purposes. Using an intellectual history approach that relies on the published writings of leading figures, she argues that women's and black rights activists in the antebellum North found in the idea of adulthood--the equal recognition of all people at age twenty-one as mature adults--the foundation for a broad range of reforms in public and private life and an effective, if temporary, basis for cross-racial and cross-class cooperation. Joined by their shared categorization as children and exclusion from full citizenship at the hands of white men, a diverse group of women and black men used equal adulthood to claim the political rights, economic independence, marital equality, familial authority, and sexual autonomy that white men claimed for themselves. As revolutionary-era political leaders made white male maturation, predicated on the perpetual immaturity and dependence of women and African Americans, the basis of republican citizenship, Abigail Adams, Phillis Wheatley, and Mary Wollstonecraft argued that women were capable of individual maturation and adult citizenship. Antebellum activists echoed and developed their ideas, as suffrage for white males at age twenty-one made full citizenship a normative life stage, which made chronological age and individual maturation central to discussions of political belonging. As evangelical reformers postulated spheres of activity for women, radical activists such as Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth Cady Stanton defined womanhood temporally rather than spatially, arguing that female maturation required rejecting separate spheres, understanding motherhood as a life stage preparatory to public power, and replacing fear of middle and old age with a pursuit of ongoing development. Frederick Douglass, meanwhile, brought a sharp age consciousness to his autobiography, observing that slaveowners kept slaves ignorant of their ages to avoid empowering them with notions of individual development, and honing in on twenty-one as a decisive transition to manhood and freedom for white boys and--through the timing of his escape--for himself. Unlike Nancy Isenberg in Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, 1998), Field does not directly interrogate abolitionism's impact on antebellum feminism, but she contributes to that inquiry by arguing that Stanton incorporated Douglass' emphasis on the political significance of age twenty-one and worked with him to build a coalition to define equal citizenship. From a different standpoint highlighting protections rather than rights, Harriet Jacobs used chronological age to delineate and defend the sexual purity of girlhood and gamer northern sympathy for female slaves. The unifying power of such tactics was evident in the women's rights conventions of the 1840s and 1850s as activists with disparate goals--political participation, higher education, meaningful work, higher wages, and married women's property rights--claimed in common that all Americans should be equally free at age twenty-one to pursue their ambitions. …

Within discussions of land and resource rights, there is growing attention to women's rights, mostly in terms of household and individual rights to private property. This leaves unanswered questions about whether and how women's land rights can be secured under collective tenure, upon which billions of people worldwide depend. There is an important gap in conceptual tools, empirical understanding, and policy recommendations on this topic. To address this gap and lay the foundations for a sound body of empirical studies and appropriate policies, we develop a conceptual framework to improve understanding of women's land rights under collective tenure. We discuss what secure tenure for women on collective lands would entail, then what factors would affect women's tenure security. We give attention to particularities of rangelands, forests, and other types of collective lands as well as commonalities across types. A key theme that emerges is that for women to have secure tenure under collective tenure, the collective (group) itself must have tenure security and the women must have secure rights within this collective. The latter requires us to consider the governance structures, how men and women access and control land, and the extent to which women have voice and power within the collective. More consistent analyses of collective tenure systems using the conceptual framework presented in this paper can help to identify which action resources are important for groups to secure rights to collective lands, and for women to advocate for their rights within the group. • There is insufficient understanding of women's tenure security on collective lands. • Our framework helps identify factors affecting women's collective tenure security. • Women's collective tenure security depends on group and individual rights. • First, the group that holds the land must itself have tenure security. • Second, women should have secure rights in the group and in collective governance.

This article takes Turkey as a case study, exploring marital and inheritance regimes with regard to their impact on women and their ability to protect women's property rights. The aim of the study is to bring to light the workings of the legal system that regulate the acquisition of property and to scrutinize the gap between the law and its practice in Turkish society. By taking this approach, the article does not only focus on laws but also on how these laws are adopted by society. Thus, two levels of analysis—de jure and de facto—are utilized for an investigation of women's property rights and hence their social and economic status.

The fate of marriage gifts during a customary law divorce is significant for the interaction of legal orders in sub-Saharan Africa, especially in the context of scholars' fixation with conflict of laws. In analysing this fatet, this article introduces normative intersectionality as a theoretical framework for a nuanced understanding of how laws and socio-economic forces interact in post-colonial settings. Normative intersectionality rejects a legal positivist view of rights, which neglects people's adaptation of indigenous norms to socioeconomic changes. In this sense, normative intersectionality is useful for addressing the traditional Igbo law of matrimonial property, which regards a married woman's property rights as subsumed in her husband's rights. Using the division of marriage gifts in Southern Nigeria as a case study, the article draws attention to how legal orders speak to, rather than against, each other, and in so doing, stresses the adaptive character of indigenous laws. It argues that normative intersectionality illumines the interplay of gender equality, property rights and legal pluralism. Accordingly, it urges judges to use the imitative nature of legal pluralism in post-colonial settings to remedy entrenched systems of injustice and inequality, which often hide under the banner of tradition.

Most measures of inequality focus on the distribution of income and resources. A potentially important additional source of inequality stems from unequal property rights protection. The aim of the present paper was to examine the existence and patterns of systematic within-country inequalities in effective land rights in Rwanda. While a large qualitative literature discusses the comparative land rights of different groups, there is a lack of systematic quantitative evidence on the existence of land right inequalities. The results of estimations drawing on data on the land tenure arrangements of over 17 000 Rwandan households do indeed suggest within-country inequalities in land rights. In particular, despite recent reform efforts to improve women's land rights, a gender gap in land rights was observed that persisted throughout the 2005–2011 period studied, highlighting that institutional development takes time and that changes in de jure legislation do not automatically translate into changes in effective rights. Moreover, conflict-displaced households and households resettled to newly constructed village settlements all report weaker land rights than their respective comparison groups.

[Thousands of sensitive Hindu women … for the first time in their lives left the precious sanctuary of their sheltering homes [during India's freedom struggle]. They came to the battle field and stood beside their brothers and faced jail and lathi charges and often enough, humiliation worse than death. If today … [they] who fought for the independence of India are to be denied their just rights, then our hard-earned freedom is no more than a handful of dust. (Padmaja Naidu (Congress legislator), Parliamentary debates over the Hindu Code Bill in 1951) May God save us from … having an army of unmarried women. (M.A. Ayyangar (Congress Legislator) predicting the result of daughters getting property during the Parliamentary debates on the Hindu Code Bill in 1951) The formulation of contemporary inheritance laws on landed property has involved a complex process of interaction between the (colonial and postcolonial) State and different segments of the population, the interplay of varying ideologies and interests, and the conflicting pulls of scriptural rules and local custom. Around the early part of this century, these interactions increasingly took the form of explicit contestation, especially over women's property rights, revealed most prominently (but not only) in the pre- and post-Independence debates surrounding the Hindu Code Bill in India. Large numbers of Indian women participated in an organized campaign to expand women's rights, including property rights. Many Indian men supported the cause; the majority adamantly oppose it.

The Domestic Relations Bill in Uganda: Potentially Addressing Polygamy, Bride Price, Cohabitation, Marital Rape, Widow Inheritance and Female Genital Mutilation

Notwithstanding the provisions of the 1999 Constitution and several International and Regional treaties such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), the Convention On the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) and the Protocol to the Africa Charter on Human and People's Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa; discrimination and violations of women's rights still occupying in Nigeria. Women are discriminated against in the area of politics, decision-making and other spheres; Nigeria is still one of the countries with the highest maternal mortality rate in the world; violence against women exist both in the private and public lives and there are still discriminatory laws that violate the rights of women in our law books. This paper examines the current realities of women's rights in Nigeria under seven headings i.e. Gender Based Violence, Women's Access to land, Access to Justice and Equal Protection Under the Law, Health and Reproductive Rights, Right to Participation in Political and Decision-Making Processes, Right to Inheritance and Marriage, Separation, Divorce and Women's Property Rights. Also, the positive actions that have been taken to address these issues such as the passage of the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act and the development of the Standards and Guidelines for the medical management of victims of violence in Nigeria will be discussed. Finally, actions that are required towards the realization of women's rights will also be appraised. Keywords : women’s rights, Nigeria, discrimination DOI : 10.7176/JAAS/53-07

This research paper examines the evolution and reform of laws in India, focusing on shifting paradigms on the concept of gender equality specifically regarding women's property rights. The study explores the driving factors behind this paradigm shift triggering the legal reforms, emphasizing the extensive processes and timelines required for significant change. It identifies persistent gaps in these rights, highlighting challenges arising from insufficient implementation, inadequate administrative support, gender inequality and deeply ingrained patriarchal mindsets. While acknowledging legislative advancements like the Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act of 2005, the paper underscores ongoing challenges related to patrilineal inheritance systems, personal laws, and regional variations in reform implementation. The authors advocate for a holistic approach to address implementation complexities and recommend strategies to raise awareness and empower women through equitable property rights enforcement for daughters. Abstrak Artikel ini meneliti evolusi dan reformasi hukum di India, dengan fokus pada perubahan paradigma kesetaraan gender, khususnya hak milik perempuan. Studi ini mengeksplorasi faktor-faktor yang memicu reformasi hukum dan menyoroti proses serta waktu yang diperlukan untuk perubahan signifikan. Penelitian ini juga mengidentifikasi kesenjangan yang masih ada dalam hak-hak tersebut, terutama terkait kurangnya implementasi, dukungan administratif yang lemah, ketidaksetaraan gender, dan pola pikir patriarkal yang kuat. Meskipun terdapat kemajuan legislatif seperti Undang-Undang Amandemen Pewarisan Hindu tahun 2005, tantangan masih berlanjut, termasuk sistem pewarisan patrilineal, hukum pribadi, dan variasi regional dalam penerapan reformasi. Penulis mendorong pendekatan holistik untuk mengatasi masalah implementasi dan merekomendasikan strategi untuk meningkatkan kesadaran serta memberdayakan perempuan melalui penegakan hak milik yang adil bagi anak perempuan.

The Hindu Succession Act, 1956, marked a watershed moment in Indian legal history by fundamentally transforming the property rights of Hindu women. Section 14 of the Act, in particular, represents a radical departure from the traditional Hindu law's concept of limited estate (stridhana) to absolute ownership rights for women. This paper critically examines the evolution, interpretation, and impact of Section 14, analyzing its role in promoting gender equality in property rights. Through comprehensive legal analysis, case law examination, and comparative study, this research evaluates the effectiveness of Section 14 in achieving its intended objectives while identifying persistent challenges in implementation. The study employs doctrinal research methodology, examining statutory provisions, judicial interpretations, and legislative amendments to present a holistic view of women's property rights under Hindu law.

Over the last decade, many international organisations such as the World Bank, Department for International Development (DFID) and United States Agency for International Development have expanded their programmes on land tenure reforms in developing countries. Throughout this process, women's exclusion from land ownership has been increasingly questioned and legal reforms have been suggested as one solution. The aim of this paper is to explore and analyse the experiences of implementers of land registration and titling vis-a-vis women's land rights in the Northern Province of Rwanda. Data were collected through semi-structured interviews and focus group discussions with administrative staff at different levels involved in the programme. From the implementers' experiences, the findings show that the land certificate does not necessarily guarantee women decision-making over land, but also that women show increased awareness of land issues, which has led to land conflicts involving women. Secondly, the challenges encountered, such as polygamy, inheritance and ingaragazi issues, as well as men's unwillingness to register their marriages, are related to men's customary rights to land and to deeply embedded socio-cultural norms. The implementers' experiences and the encountered challenges during the reform process are framed by the values of a patriarchal society in which the supremacy of men over women is still strong. This leads to a ‘theory/practice dilemma’ where laws and policies that look good on paper are not necessarily easily implemented and where the intentions of laws are not necessarily logic to the local-level implementers.

This article examines the connections between domestic violence and the right to housing. While much attention has been paid to domestic violence as a violation of civil and political rights, little has been given to its unquestionable links to the socioeconomic conditions surrounding and leading to the violence. The author suggests that the universally accepted human right to housing specifically includes the right to live free from domestic violence; therefore, this right is blatantly violated when domestic violence occurs. The prevention and eradication of domestic violence should consequently start with the protection of women's right to adequate housing. However, an analysis of the currently existing international instruments addressing violence against women, read together with their main interpretations, will disclose their limitation for women's protection from domestic violence. With an almost exclusive focus on civil and political rights, such instruments disregard women's housing and property rights in their provisions and do not protect battered women where they most need it: at home. Thus, the article also identifies some normative challenges and makes some observations about the solutions that require increased study and attention by international organizations and human rights organizations working with women's rights.