Land distribution and access to land are key issues in Zimbabwe. In recent years, nearly all of the country's commercial farm land has been re-designated, leaving most farm workers dislocated from their farm villages. The government of Zimbabwe argues that the land reform programme is needed to achieve historical and social justice. However, this article concludes that the government is engaged in serious human rights violations and is appropriating land to distribute to its followers for political not social justice ends.

How can the abstract principles of the human rights-based approach (HRBA) be translated into practical strategies to improve women's ownership and access to land? In Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, despite changes in national law and policy aiming to improve women's land tenure, none of the land reforms meet human rights standards. This is because legal regulation of land blurs with customary laws mostly relating to land transactions and family, marriage or inheritance.

The renovation process in Vietnam in the past decade has enabled significant economic growth as well as and greater rights and more important economic roles of farming households. However, much of this reform has focussed on men as head of households, meaning men have benefited more from economic reform, both economically and in terms of their power within the household. Inequalities continue in access to and control of key resources such as land, water, credit and rest time, as well as in access to public services.

This submission by the government of Egypt to the Committee on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) combines the fourth and fifth periodic reports, covering the period 1994 to 1998. It highlights the important role women have played in the country's development processes. The women's movement in Egypt has received widespread support and encouragement from governmental and non-governmental actors alike.

While the majority of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and particularly Eastern Africa provide a living for their families on land, they largely do not own it. This comprises one part of a study on women and land in five countries in Eastern Africa - and was commissioned by the Eastern African Sub-Regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI).

This study attempts to analyse changing patterns of land transfer and ownership, as well as school investments by gender over three generations in customary land areas of Ghana's Western Region. Traditional inheritance rules deny land ownership rights to women. Yet the increase in the demand for women's labour due to the expansion of labour intensive cocoa cultivation has created incentives for husbands to give their wives and children land. Through this and other gift mechanisms, women have increasingly acquired land, thereby reducing the gender gap in land ownership.

The Domestic Relations Bill is a crucial piece of legislation for Ugandan women. It addresses women's property rights in marriage and women's right to negotiate sex, it sets the minimum age of marriage at eighteen, prohibits female genital mutilation (FGM) and criminalises widow inheritance. Bride price is still not prohibited, but the payment of bride price will no longer be essential for formalising customary marriages. The bill criminalises marital rape and provides for civil remedies, such as compensation and restricting orders.

Because of their lower social and economic status, as well as physiological needs, women are often more vulnerable to nutritional problems. When it comes to sharing food resources in the home, women and girls can lose out. Indeed, the full realisation of the right to food for women depends on parallel achievements in the right to health, education, access to information and access to resources such as land.

Women do 70 per cent of the agricultural work in Senegal, but according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), own only two percent of the land that may be cultivated. Although property laws in countries such as Senegal, Tunisia and Burkina Faso recognise women' s and men's equal rights, and Islam gives women the right to inherit half what men inherit, in practice men retain land ownership. Women are dependent on fathers or husbands for land.

How are family gender relations affected by extra-household conditions in South Asia' By investigating quantitative factors (e.g. land ownership and income), along with qualitative aspects (e.g. social perceptions, interaction of gender relations in market, community, state and household), this paper shows how these multiple conditions influence the relative bargaining power of different household members. It argues that such understanding is vital for designing policy interventions. Control over land and income increases an individual's bargaining power.

This paper argues that widows and female children in Tanzania have traditionally been denied the right to inherit property from their husbands, even when the property was acquired during the marriage. This is further complicated by a three-part legal system consisting of customary law (law grounded in customs or traditions), Islamic law, and statutory law (law set down by a legislature). As a result, Tanzanian women and their children are often left homeless upon the death of their husbands.

This study aims to identify how women's capacity to become more involved in decision-making at the local level can be strengthened, particularly in terms of access to natural resources. It also aims to identify the structures through which women secure their systems of production. It focuses on the situation in Niger, where women are increasingly excluded from dominant systems of production: in agricultural areas, they are increasingly excluded from agricultural production and in pastoralist areas, they have lost their herds and had to resort to agriculture.