Report of the National Conference: Women's Property Rights ... - FAO

Women’s Land and Property Rights – A Global PerspectiveOpening Address by Robin Palmer, Global Land Adviser, Oxfam GBIntroductionI am both pleased and honoured to be here today. But also deeply disappointed because itshould be Kaori Izumi of FAO standing before you rather than I.Kaori, as many of you here will know, has worked tirelessly on the issues of women’sland and property rights in Southern and Eastern Africa over many years, and it is largelydue to her passionate commitment and energy that important meetings such as this andthe others that have preceded it have taken place. With enormous energy she has helpedindividuals and organisations; she has galvanised the energies of her own organisationand that of others, including my own; she has mobilised donors, and lobbied governmentsand others at many levels in a tireless pursuit for justice for women’s rights, andparticularly for the rights of those women who have suffered manifold discrimination as aconsequence of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, which has so traumatised Southern and EasternAfrica.‘Kaori’s T-shirt’, as Sibongile Ndashe, from the Women’s Legal; Centre in Cape Town,described it to me last week – this wonderful design from the workshop in Zimbabwe inDecember 2004 – has drawn many admirers. I have it posted on my desk at work, it is thescreen saver on my computer, and I generally sleep in it on my travels! Colleaguesregularly admire it and its succinct message – ‘property and a piece of land give womenpeace of mind.’The issues which we shall be discussing over the next 3 days are hugely complex anddifficult the world over. There are no easy, painless, single solutions. If there were, wewould not need to be here. They are complex because they operate at so many differentlevels and so require responses at different levels. Most critically perhaps at the domesticlevel of the household, in the complex relationships between women and men, and also atthe level of ‘traditional’ institutions. Someone once wrote that gender struggles are evenmore difficult than class struggles because, unlike women and men, the capitalist and theworker did not normally live under the same roof!Before talking about global perspectives, I want to say 3 things.• First, what you are facing in Zambia, and elsewhere, is in reality a growingemergency that requires emergency attention.• Second, having acknowledged this, there is a major challenge to accept that manytraditional attitudes and customs that may once have been appropriate, are nowhighly inappropriate and need to change, and change rapidly, in the new realitiesresulting from HIV/AIDS.39