Women's Land Rights & Privatization in Eastern Africa

Download or read book Women's Land Rights & Privatization in Eastern Africa written by Birgit Englert and published by Boydell & Brewer Ltd. This book was released on 2008 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Are women's fragile land rights in Africa being eroded in a period of privatisation and land reforms sponsored by the World Bank? Changing global employment and trade patters and the HIV/AIDS epidemic has affected women in particular. A complexity is that women's and men's interests within households are both joint and separate, yet many land reform programmes are based on the notion of a unitary household in which resources benefit the whole family. Today new land market opportunities also tend to put women at a disadvantage, just as they were under colonialism. Women's secondary rights to land are being extinguished. The detailed, local level research in this volume not only challenges the status quo, but demonstrates that another world is possible and documents the many ways women in Eastern Africa are finding to ensure their rights to land.