Aims of the Book

Land is the main resource from which millions of people in rural Africa derive their livelihoods. That women do the vast majority of work in agricultural smallholder production, producing between 60 and 80 per cent of all food grown in African countries, has become a common observation – and with it the concern that most women on the continent do not hold secure rights to the land from which they derive their own and their family's livelihood. In most African societies, a woman's right to access and control land is still tied to her status as a daughter, sister, mother or wife.

At an FAO/OXFAM GB Workshop on ‘Women's Land Rights in Eastern and Southern Africa’ held in Pretoria in June 2003, it was noted that women's already relatively more fragile land rights were being further eroded in the context of various contemporary processes of change, such as commoditization, economic and rural–urban change, conflict (and post-conflict reconstruction and reconciliation), the spread of HIV/AIDS, and the increasing ‘privatization’ of land tenure (Englert & Palmer 2003, 1). Among these processes of change, the privatization of land tenure – by which is meant the formulation and implementation of land tenure reforms which aim primarily at the private registration of land – has the most direct impact on women's land rights. Moreover, as tenure reforms can be shaped and influenced by those who are concerned to protect women's land rights, in both formulation and implementation phases, they are also distinct by their very nature from other contextual processes of change.

The Pretoria Workshop identified an urgent need for further research into both the dynamics of tenure systems based on custom and the impact of land tenure privatization policies on women's rights to land. This volume owes its inspiration to this, and aims to contribute to the debate with specific reference to Eastern Africa. At the Workshop it was repeatedly noted that contexts are very heterogeneous, that the different geographical, historical, political, socio-economic, cultural and legal realities which shape land rights in any given country are of the utmost importance, and that gender is only one differentiating factor among many, intersecting in critical ways with others such as age, marital status, education and economic situation – challenges which this volume also attempts to address.