Property and Inheritance Rights for Women
Poverty Reduction | ICRW Projects
It is widely recognized that if women are to improve their lives and escape poverty, they need the appropriate skills, resources and tools to do so.
Yet women in many countries are far less likely than men to own property and otherwise control assets — key tools to gaining economic security and earning higher incomes.
Why Are Women's Property and Inheritance Rights Important?
ICRW's Work
Moving Forward: Assessing the Gender Asset Gap
ICRW in Action: A Research Scan
ICRW in Action: South Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa
Why Are Women’s Property and Inheritance Rights Important?
Women who own property or otherwise control assets are better positioned to improve their lives and cope should they experience a crisis. By owning their home and land, women directly gain from such benefits as use of the land and higher incomes as well as having a secure place to live.
Women’s asset ownership has been found to enhance women’s social status and decision-making role within the household and community. It also leads to improved child nutritional status, higher education for girls and other positive impacts.
The lack of property ownership, in contrast, has been found to contribute to women’s low social status and their vulnerability to poverty. It also increasingly is linked to development-related problems, including HIV and AIDS, hunger, urbanization, migration and domestic violence.
ICRW’s Work on Women’s Property and Inheritance Rights
Through its work for the Millennium Project, ICRW has been a forceful proponent for property and inheritance rights for women and girls as a key precondition for achieving the third Millennium Development Goal — gender equality and women’s empowerment.
ICRW, in partnership with the Global Coalition on Women and AIDS (GCWA) and the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), will examine the links between women's and girls' property and inheritance rights and their vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. In a new grants competition, eight organizations in sub-Saharan Africa have receive d$25,000 each to create a body of evidence that demonstrates effective programs to address links between HIV/AIDS and property rights.
Grants are supporting one-year projects implemented by nongovernmental organizations and others working at the community and institutional levels to:
- identify and strengthen promising interventions to improve women's realization of their property rights;
- document these models; and
- share the findings with a wide range of audiences, including international donor community and in-country program practitioners and policymakers.
Grantees have been selected among organizations in Kenya, Malawi, Rwanda, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Project grantees include:
- Community Law Centre and Saartjie Baartman Centre for Women & Children (CLC), South Africa
- Grassroots Organizations Operating Together in Sisterhood (GROOTS), Kenya
- Kenya AIDS NGOs Consortium (KANCO), Kenya
- Ntengwe for Community Development Trust (NCD), Zimbabwe
- Rwanda Women's Network (RWN), Rwanda
- Women's Voice, Malawi
- Young Widows Advancement Program (YWAP), Kenya
- Zimbabwe Widows and Orphans Trust (ZWOT), Zimbabwe
This program also will conduct a case study of the Justice for Widows and Orphans Project (JWOP) in Zambia. The case study will document what JWOP does, its accomplishments and challenges, and ways for JWOP and its partners to disseminate lessons learned so others can draw from their experiences.
For more information, contact Nata Duvvury.
Moving Forward: Assessing the Gender Asset Gap
The scale and energy of efforts to secure women’s property and inheritance rights have grown in recent years, and many countries in various regions of the world, particularly South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa, are engaged in constitutional reviews and land reforms. Now is an opportune time to provide evidence in support of advocacy, legislation and law enforcement aimed at ensuring women’s rights to property and inheritance. However, the lack of data on the asset gap remains one of the biggest challenges to progress.
ICRW in Action: A Research Scan
ICRW recently completed a scan of data sources for countries in sub-Saharan Africa that contain gender-disaggregated information on property rights. This review confirmed that very few data sources exist — only seven data sets spanning six countries were found that contain information on asset ownership by sex. Moreover, the data are not comparable across countries because the studies had different purposes and the survey instruments were not standardized.
ICRW in Action: South Asia and Sub-saharan Africa
ICRW has launched a major new initiative on women’s property and inheritance rights in the context of HIV and AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The initiative consists of four components:
- A grants program to support community-based or national organizations in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia that are implementing innovative projects to advance women’s property rights in the context of HIV and AIDS;
- Public education campaigns targeted to decision makers at national and regional levels in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia;
- Documentation of good practices that can be replicated or scaled up; and
- Organizing and building coalitions among HIV/AIDS, women’s, legal, and human rights organizations at country, regional and international levels.
South Asia
ICRW’s global policy advocacy on women’s property rights is supported by field-based research conducted in collaboration with local partners. In South Asia, ICRW and its partners are documenting how property rights can act as a form of social protection against violence. ICRW is working with three local organizations to examine the relationship between property ownership and domestic violence for women in three different cultural settings — Kerala and West Bengal in India, and in Sri Lanka. The study is exploring ways in which ownership reduces women’s vulnerability to violence and enhances their social protection as well as how the gap between nominal ownership and effective control of property by the woman can be reduced.
Sub-Saharan Africa
ICRW and its partners in sub-Saharan Africa are conducting a longitudinal study that examines the linkages between women’s access to property rights, vulnerability to HIV, and risk of domestic violence. This study will be conducted in multiple sites in Uganda and South Africa. A study exploring these linkages is relevant because a lack of secure property rights exacerbates women’s and girls’ vulnerabilities within the context of HIV/AIDS.
To Learn More ...
Read ICRW publications on these issues:
- To Have and to Hold: Women's Property and Inheritance Rights in the Context of HIV/AIDS in Sub-Saharan Africa
- Toward Achieving Gender Equality and Empowering Women
Additional resources: