Women’s Land Rights in Rwanda: How can they be protected and strengthened as the Land Law is implemented

In Rwanda, two factors make land a highly important and contested issue. First,
Rwanda has the highest person-to-land ratio in Africa. This creates tremendous
pressure on land in a country where most of the population lives in rural areas, and
where agriculture remains the central economic activity. Second, Rwanda is recovering
from massive population shifts caused by decades of ethnic strife and the 1994 civil war
and genocide, which resulted in displaced populations and overlapping land claims.
Due to the high person-to-land ratio, many rural families that depend on land resources
hold plots of sub-optimal size. Concurrently, insufficient land for the landless and for
Rwandans returning from years or decades as refugees abroad is also a problem that the
government has attempted to remedy through the controversial policies of “land
sharing” and grouped settlement, or “villiagisation.” Additionally, there are conflicting
claims to land parcels, which have been created by a series of population displacements
and returns since 1959.