88
23.
24.
25. 26.
27.
28.
29.
EMPOWERING WOMEN
are couples who live together but are not married according to religious or customary practices or registered with the state. Most relationships in many countries are customary marriages or consensual unions. For example, Article 87 of Côte d’Ivoire’s 1983 Marriage Code allows the wife to bring a claim before the court to revert to a separate property regime if the husband mismanages community property. This issue is likely to make it to court only for wealthier couples. However, it is an important signal for the wider population about how nonmonetary contributions are treated. An exception is couples in matrilocal communities (communities in which the husband moves to his wife’s village). The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child stipulates that children born out of wedlock fall under succession. The laudable intention was to provide for all the deceased’s children; the effect, however, was to further diminish the property rights of the widow. Depending on the nature of the ownership arrangements of the land, similar restrictions may also pertain to men. But the more common pattern is that women have user rights in land that belongs to the husband’s family—rights that do not confer to their children and often “expire” when they remarry. The two major land tenure systems in Sub-Saharan Africa are customary and statutory tenure. Current land tenure regimes, which generally include a mix of customary, statutory, and legal arrangements, have their origins in the early colonial period of land consolidation, when colonialists left family and community concerns such as land under the jurisdiction of customary law and customary courts. After the 1930s, customary tenure arrangements became an obstacle to changing colonial objectives, which incorporated the promotion of economic growth through agricultural production. The new goals were predicated upon the state’s fostering the emergence of a freehold system and individual property of land ownership. With the introduction of private property systems, women lost out, because their rights to land through husbands, fathers, or sons diminished in importance. In 2006, Zambia’s Land Ministry estimated the share of customary land at 93 percent 2006 (Ministry of Lands of the Republic of Zambia 2006). Whatever the exact figure, the vast majority of land in Zambia is customary land.