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3E Project: Healthcare
Women’s Rights and Access to Land
Posted: August 5, 2011
One out of seven people in the world is suffering from hunger. Hunger and malnutrition are not inescapable natural facts, according to ActionAid’s report on Women’s Land Rights, they are the consequence of inequalities between rich and poor, men and women.
More than 60% of the hungry are women and children, yet women produce 60% to 80% of the food in developing countries. In many countries legislation prevents women from owning and inheriting land, which increases their vulnerability to poverty and exposes them to further discrimination. Women lose their land rights as a consequence of their husbands’ death.
Felitus Kures is a widow living in North Eastern Uganda. Her husband’s death left her solely responsible for their children. To meet their needs, she depended on the small piece of land she and her husband had farmed together. But just months after his funeral, her in-laws sold her husband’s land without her knowledge. “We only realized this when the buyer came to evict us,” Ms. Kures explains. She was able to regain use of the land after she got legal assistance with the help of the Uganda Land Alliance, a civil society group that campaigns for land rights.
Ms. Kures’s plight is a common one in Africa, although she was more fortunate than most other women. Many never regain access or rights to matrimonial land lost after divorce or the death of a spouse.
Experts report that women in Africa contribute 70 per cent of food production. They also account for nearly half of all farm labour, and 80–90 per cent of food processing, storage and transport, as well as hoeing and weeding. Yet according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) women often lack rights to land. Land rights tend to be held by men or kinship groups controlled by men, and women have access mainly through a male relative, usually a father or husband.
Women’s right to land has seldom been considered in development debates, yet where land is more equally distributed and managed between men and women, there is a marked improvement in economic development, child and maternal health, and education. Where women’s right to own and inherit land is denied, negative spirals of poverty are registered and several socio-economic indicators worsen. Despite this knowledge and heritage of women’s rights in international declarations and conventions, very little has been done in terms of concrete actions and measures. The price crisis of agricultural products and, more broadly, the world economic crisis have sharpened the existing inequalities, amplifying women’s vulnerability related to nutrition. Little has been done on the way to end hunger, eradicate inequalities and give back to women their dignity and food sovereignty.
Women’s rights to land and natural resources, say Action Aid, are the missing link in the analysis of the food crisis. Women’s empowerment, protecting women’s food sovereignty and building their capacity in the agricultural sector is an essential precondition to achieve the 1st Millennium Development Goal, which aims to halve the proportion of people who suffer from hunger by 2015.
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