Taking action: achieving gender equality and empowering women

Guarantee women’s property and inheritance rights
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Attention needs
to focus on
identifying and
eliminating the
points at which
discriminatory
practices come
into play
Government-initiated land reforms and resettlement schemes. Although government
land redistribution programs provide an opportunity to equalize property
rights between men and women, this happens infrequently. In India, Agarwal
(2002, p. 8) concludes that, “irrespective of the program under which the
transfers occur, typically the land is allotted almost exclusively to males, even
in communities which traditionally practiced matrilineal inheritance, such as
the Garos of northeast India.”
In Uzbekistan international agencies have been heavily involved in setting
the land reform agenda, favoring establishing secure and tradable property
rights and eliminating price distortions and production quotas. As a consequence,
the private sector share in agricultural production has increased substantially.
This has led to the emergence of a new category of private holdings
in which management is almost exclusively in male hands while the unpaid
family labor that keeps the private holdings viable is predominantly female
(Razavi 2004).
In some Latin American countries, such as Colombia and Costa Rica, the
experience has been somewhat better. And Viet Nam has recently piloted a
program to retitle land jointly in the names of both husband and wife (Mason
and Carlsson 2004). But in other countries—such as Bolivia and Ecuador—
land reform has failed to address women’s land rights. Although most agrarian
reform laws were gender neutral, the legal beneficiaries were household heads,
defined culturally as the male (Deere and Leon 2003).
Interventions for property rights
Since 1995 there has been growing awareness and policy attention to women’s
property and inheritance rights, drawing on evolving human rightsbased
frameworks. Within countries attention needs to focus on identifying
and eliminating the points at which discriminatory practices come into play,
including complex or archaic legal systems, deep-rooted social and cultural
norms, and persistent lack of awareness about individual rights and legal protections.
A common problem is how to approach property and inheritance
where informal or traditional practices might offer more security to women
than newer market-oriented practices that formalize ownership and establish
title to land and other property. Countries need to understand how privatization
of property (whether through purchase, inheritance, or other means)
affects men and women differently, especially where legal regimes discriminate
by sex. Interventions for increasing women’s access to land and housing must
be context-specific: there is no single global blueprint.
Reforming laws and supporting women’s claims to property
Several changes are necessary within countries to ensure women’s property
rights: amending and harmonizing statutory and customary laws, promoting
legal literacy, supporting organizations that can help women make land claims,