Africa

The debate over land law reform in Africa has been framed as a referendum on the market – that is, as a debate pitting advocates of the growth-promoting individualization of property rights against those who call for protecting the livelihoods and subsistence rights of small farmers. This article argues that the prospect of land law reform also raises a complex bundle of constitutional issues. In many African countries, debates over land law reform are turning into referenda on the nature of citizenship, political authority, and the future of the liberal nation state itself.

In the context of the current food crisis confronting most sub-Saharan African economies the need to unmask the identities of rural producers from a gender perspective is reinforced. This article focuses on three major issues which have tended towards ambiguity in analyses of rural political economy. First, the question of women's differential land use rights is analysed in terms of the impact agricultural modernisation has had on traditional status. Second, the complexity in household form and composition is drawn out.

This is a report of a workshop organized by the USAID which sought to highlight the discrepancies between women’s land rights under the law and popular perceptions of those rights, as identified during consultations with the State, outline policy and legal trends related to women’s land rights in other countries in the region and elicit policy recommendations for the draft GOSS land policy intended to expand and strengthen women’s land rights.

This paper reviews the reality of women’s land and property rights in three Eastern Africa countries: Kenya, Sudan and Ethiopia. It considers legal and other impediments hindering these rights in situations of conflict and reconstruction. It also outlines the practical problems faced by women in connection with the legal and traditional structures regarding land and property rights, and makes some suggestions about how the situation can be rectified.