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Showing items 1 through 9 of 8.
  1. Library Resource

    Lesotho: Law, land tenure and gender review: Southern Africa

    Reports & Research
    December, 2005
    Lesotho

    This document is a chapter in a larger report commissioned by UN habitat to review the laws and land tenure of Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia. The report provides a brief historical background, snapshots of how the government and legal systems operate, reviews land tenure, the various types of land in the country and the relevant constitutional provisions laws and policies. The chapter also examines housing rights and accessibility of services.

  2. Library Resource
    Reports & Research
    January, 2006
    Malawi, Southern Africa, Eastern Africa

    Malawi is facing increasing land scarcity and food insecurity for its large rural population and is in the midst of an on-going land policy reform process. This report asks how these reforms may affect women's land rights in a situation of increasing scarcity and competition for land. Reforms include the formalisation of customary land rights as private land rights as a way to ensure tenure security and equitable access to land. It warns that through this approach, women's rights may become increasingly marginalised.

  3. Library Resource
    Reports & Research
    January, 2006
    South Africa, Southern Africa, Eastern Africa

    Indigenous land tenure arrangements in South Africa have generally consisted of communal ownership. In this system, who benefited from the land depended on their status as family or clan head. The colonial regime dispossessed Africans of land in favour of European arrivals, or defined family property as ancestral property in which the senior males of the head family were taken as the owners with the rights to inherit. The post-apartheid government conceptualised acess to land for the previously disadvantaged as a human right.

  4. Library Resource
    Reports & Research
    January, 2005
    Southern Africa, Eastern Africa

    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.

  5. Library Resource
    Reports & Research
    February, 2005
    Uganda, Southern Africa, Western Africa, Eastern Africa

    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.

  6. Library Resource
    Reports & Research
    January, 2005
    Tanzania, Southern Africa, Eastern Africa

    The Women Advancement Trust (WAT) in Tanzania carries out various initiatives related to land rights, affordable housing, and inheritance rights. This report presents lessons learned from a housing and shelter development initiative. The goals of the initiative were to empower low-income communities, particularly women, to participate fully and actively in all aspects of human settlements development, including the improvement of their living and housing conditions.

  7. Library Resource
    January, 2005
    Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Russia, Moldova, Belarus, South Africa, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tanzania, Kazakhstan, Armenia, Brazil, Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean

    This brief explores the reform of land tenure institutions which re-emerged in the 1990s, and asks if these reforms are any more gender sensitive than those of the past?The paper highlights that a focus of the recent reforms has been on land titling, designed to promote security of tenure and stimulate land markets. The reforms have often been driven by domestic and external neoliberal coalitions, with funding from global and regional organisations which have argued that private property rights are essential for a dynamic agricultural sector.

  8. Library Resource
    Reports & Research
    July, 2005
    Namibia, Africa

    Report divided into 5 themes: legal issuers of women’s rights to land and property in Namibia; traditional institutions on women’s land and property rights; HIV/AIDS, land and property rights, and livelihood strategies; Namibian experiences; regional experiences (Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe).

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