Africa

Legislation can be instrumental in impeding or promoting initiatives to address the HIV/AIDS epidemic. The widespread legal, social, economic and political ramifications of the epidemic make it necessary to review and reform a broad range of laws. Within a context of entrenched gender discrimination, the devastating impacts of HIV/AIDS, widespread poverty and increasing competition for resources such as property and land, legislative solutions to the denial of women’s rights are urgently needed.

This report documents the tragic reality that under both statutory and customary law, the overwhelming majority of women in Sub-Saharan Africa (including Nigeria and Senegal) – regardless of their marital status- cannot own or inherit land, housing and other property in their own rights. Instead, in respect of access to land and housing, women are made entirely dependent on their relationship to a male.

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.