COHRE Housing Rights Africa Issue Brief 2

COHRE Women and Housing Rights Programme: ISSUE BRIEF TWO

Women and Housing Rights

ISSUE BRIEF Contents Women and Housing Rights in Africa..........................................1 Making the Link Between Housing and Land Security........4 Women’s Housing Rights Within the Context of HIV/AIDS..........6 Women’s Rights to Water and Sanitation...................................8 The Housing Rights of Refugee and Displaced Women..............10

Women and Housing Rights in Africa Women throughout Africa face many housing rights challenges. In many part of Africa, for example, a woman’s access to housing usually depends upon her relationship to a male, in most cases either her husband or father. Rarely are women able to gain housing and land in their own right. Women who do not control their own 1

Challenges and Issues

housing, and are unable to access housing and land independently, are placed in a precarious position in which they may face homelessness and destitution at any given moment. This dependency also makes women much more vulnerable to gender-based violence and exploitation.

widowhood rate up to a full 25 per cent of all African women.

In some African countries, the figure is sadly even higher.

Within this context, dependency on a male family member for housing and land is a precursor to tragedy for women.

Throughout Africa, widows are thrown out of their homes by in-laws who grab their property using intimidation, threats, and physical violence. This if often done under the guise of custom and tradition. The widow, often unaware of her rights or afraid of attracting further retribution or disfavour from in-laws has little

Throughout Africa, women’s housing, land and property rights are vitally important issues. The combined tragedies of armed conflict, HIV/AIDS and mounting poverty in many parts of Africa have pushed the

Poverty and Inadequate Housing Conditions

Women and Housing Rights in Of those considered poor, the majority are women. This feminisation of poverty is a trend which has recently come to the attention of the world.

It is stunning to realise that women make up more than half the world’s population, yet they own less than one percent of the world’s property.

In Africa, women face formidable challenges -- both legal and cultural -- to their housing, land and property rights.

Sub-Saharan Africa is one of the most impoverished regions in the world. Many of the countries within this region have well over 50 per cent of their population living on less than two US dollars a day.

For example, in Zambia, 64 per cent of the population lives in such desperate poverty; in Ethiopia, the figure is a staggering 82 per cent. Poverty in the region as a whole is reported to be on the increase.

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for themselves and their children, many women have little choice by to try to find some semblance of housing security in the sprawling slums which have become ubiquitous within and around Africa’s major cities.

Therefore, one of the key issues for women across Africa is their equal rights to housing, land and property, including within the context of marriage. COHRE is working with women’s rights activists to challenge the discriminatory application of both statutory and customary law, so as to ensure that women’s equal rights to housing, land and property are fully respected, protected and fulfilled.

choice but to abandon her home.

While women are sometimes told to return to their natal homes for protection, they too often return only to find that they have no place there either. There, they may find their own brothers -- to whom their parental inheritance in promised -- turning them away from their natal homes.

Desperate to find a place to live

Africa: Challenges and Issues Life in the Slums of Africa There is limited data on migration among African countries, and the data on women’s migration is even more limited. Nonetheless, urbanisation rates remain high. African cities, such as Lagos, Dar es Salaam, Lubumbashi, and Kampala have some of the highest urban growth rates in the world, and throughout Africa women make up an increasing proportion of city slum dwellers.

Unfortunately, urbanisation has not led to improved living conditions or added wealth generation in Africa’s cities. Despite urban growth rates, access to clean water and sanitation facilities has not improved in twenty years, and a statistical majority of the region’s population is still without basic amenities. Women – who constitute the majority of lowest income earners – find it very difficult to afford adequate housing in Africa’s increasingly urbanised landscape.

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Women’s Land Rights in Africa In most African countries, access to land and other natural resources forms the basis of social, political and economic well-being, and is fundamental to housing security. In the 1950s to the 1970s, newly independent Governments throughout Africa introduced agrarian reform programmes to address the colonial legacy of skewed land ownership patterns and feudal systems. While such reform came with admirable goals of more equitable land distribution,

they have largely failed to deliver any kind of secure tenure for the vast majority of women. Despite the fact that women are generally the ones farming the land, malebiased land reforms have actually contributed to the marginalisation of women and further undermined what weak rights to land they previously had.

Making the Link Between Forced Eviction and Food Security In much of sub-Saharan Africa, housing insecurity cannot be separated from land and food insecurity. Many of the cultures that forbid women to ‘inherit’ property upon the death of a spouse are also agrarian and therefore depend heavily on their own food production for their survival. Often, such societies also depend heavily on women’s agricultural production, as it is usually the women who are charged with producing food for themselves and their families.

When a woman loses her house, she almost always loses her land.

In that event, she also loses the primary means by which she is able to feed herself and her children, affecting her health and economic well-being in a multitude of ways. States also lose a major source of food production and economic gain when women are denied basic access to land on account of gender-discrimination.

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Throughout Africa, the majority of Africans hold their land under indigenous customary land tenure systems irrespective of the formal legal positions under national law.

Rural Africans, therefore, rely largely on traditional customary institutions.

To the extent that land allocation and administration continues to be done at the local level, customary norms and attitudes which discriminate against women prevail in the allocation of land.

inherent in many customary systems of land allocation, women’s human rights activists continue to highlight that women’s rights must be central to African land reform processes.

In the words of activist Maitrayee Mukhopadhyay, “gender equality in access to and control over property, especially family property, has to be argued from the point of view of women’s interests and not that of citizens or the family.” This view is wholly consistent with international human rights standards which recognise that women have not only a substantive right to equality, but also to an adequate standard of living which in the African context, only access to land can provide.

While States are sometimes reluctant address the gender-bias

Land, Equality and Empowerment

Women’s Housing and Land Security The greatest challenges in implementation of rights over land and access to land, particularly in terms of ensuring gender equality, often arise at the local level in the context of regulation of land use, management and administration.

In many instances, rights over land and access to land are determined at the local level and are not subject to the same level of public scrutiny as is national legislation. Land law may also not address the various forms of

tenure at the local level. For example, Uganda’s land law recognises various forms of tenure, but in the case of customary law does not define the forms of tenure that are recognised.

Similarly in South Africa, the Communal Land Rights Act requires communities to devise and register a communal plan for management and administration of communal lands, but it says little about ensuring gender equity in the process.

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Women’s Housing Security and the AIDS Crisis

2.5 times as likely. This staggering rate for women is ascribed in part to the subordination of women and the gendered nature of poverty.

The impact of HIV/AIDS is no doubt complex.. At the same time, it is disturbingly simple.

The staggering rate of HIV infection in sub-Saharan Africa is increasing death tolls to unprecedented levels. Over 55 per cent of all HIV infections in sub-Saharan Africa occur in women. In fact, women are considerably more likely, at least 1.2 times, to be infected with HIV than men, and for women aged 15-24, this ratio increases to

Women have tended to out live their husbands; the general trend at the household level being that the husband tends to die first.

After the death of the husband, disputes over land and housing are common, often resulting in the widow, herself often ailing with the disease, being ejected from the house by in-laws. This leaves women in a terrible predicament — not only homeless, but also struggling to live with the disease. Even if a woman is able to hold on to her home and land, she is often

‘Disinheritance’ and Discrimination

Women’s Housing Rights In many African contexts women are prevented from ‘inheriting’ their marital property upon the death of their husband.

This is because of prevailing cultural attitudes that perpetuate gender inequality and discrimination against women.

Such attitudes result in a systematic denial of women’s right to access, control and ownership of land and housing.

the death of their spouse or relative reflects the more general violation of women’s right to adequate housing. For millions of women in sub-Saharan Africa, the systematic denial of ‘inheritance’ rights lies at the heart of their economic marginalisation and housing poverty. Yet, despite these obstacles, women’s rights activists in Africa are challenging the practice of ‘disinheritance’ and advocating on behalf of women’s full and equal rights.

The fact that women cannot ‘inherit’ land and housing after 6

forced to sell them in order to meet the costs of medical and other care for herself and others in her care. At the very least, women-headed households usually have to sell off farming equipment or other vital assets, which often leads to eventual destitution.

The phenomenon of in-laws taking over the home and land of the widow has become so commonplace throughout Africa that it has gained the popular tag ‘property grabbing’. The police or other authorities have generally done little or nothing to address such incidents.

- Testimony provided to COHRE by a woman living with HIV in Uganda Following the death of her spouse, she was forcibly evicted by in-laws from her marital home

Within the Context of HIV/AIDS succeeding. However, it will take time, and time is a luxury which many women do not always have.

That is why it is critical that we join in their struggle to make women’s housing, land and property rights a reality for all women on the African continent.

Working Together for Change Increasingly women’s organisations are claiming their equal rights to housing, land and property. COHRE knows that numerous African women’s organisations are working actively to challenge cultural justifications for women’s unequal position in society.

It is heartening to see that women throughout Africa are attempting to do just that, and many times 7

Bacic Rights for All: Water and Sanitation The human rights to water and sanitation are enshrined in international human rights law, including the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women and the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. At the same time, these rights are also inextricably related to the right to adequate housing.

A home that lacks access to safe water sufficient for personal and household needs, or which lacks basic sanitation facilities, is rendered uninhabitable.

In most of the world, gender roles demand that women spend a great deal of time in the home, nurturing children and caring for the needs of their families.

Household responsibilities also require women and girls to attend to various household chores,

Women’s Rights to Water Ineqaulity in Access to Safe Water Clean water is necessary to sustain human life and to ensure good health and human dignity. Yet, more than one billion people do not have access to a safe water source and more than 2.6 billion people do not have adequate sanitation. The human rights to water and sanitation are crucial aspects of the struggle to improve this situation for the world’s poor. For women, the collection of water often has to take priority over other activities, it prevents women and girls from engaging in other productive activities, education or other domestic responsibilities, rest and recreation.

Women’s uses of water are also often given less priority than men’s. In addition, women have often had unequal access to training and credit schemes, such as for latrine construction and water point management. In spite of women’s greater interest in such issues, water and sanitation projects may not address the greater need of women for privacy at water points (particularly for bathing) and sanitation facilities.

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including providing - and using water for a variety of purposes.

For women, the home may also be the principal place of employment or income generating activities, and access to water may be a necessary component of making one’s living.

and sanitation facilities should be designed to take account of the needs of women,” and, furthermore, that “Special efforts must be made to ensure the equitable representation in decision-making of vulnerable groups and sections of the population that have traditionally been marginalized, in particular women.”

The UN SubCommission Guidelines for the Realization of the Right to Drinking Water and Sanitation recognise the difficulties that women face when it comes to securing their water and sanitation rights. The Guidelines stipulate that “Water

It is necessary that water and sanitation projects explicitly address the particular needs of women. For example, as women and girls are generally more vulnerable to attack, water and sanitation facilities must be situated in locations which provide for their safety.

The Added Burdens on Women and Girls

and Sanitiation in Africa Carrying heavy weights of up to 20 kilograms (the weight of 20 litres of water) can also lead to back and joint problems as well as sprains and fractures from falls. In some African countries, spending five hours per day collecting water to meet the family’s needs is not unusual.

Girls, in particular, shoulder the burden of water-hauling. In Africa, forty billion working hours, or 25 per cent of household time, are spent each year just carrying water.

Throughout Africa, women and girls have the traditional role of collecting water, often from great distances, affecting their health, their access to education and ability to earn a livelihood. They are in greatest physical contact in the domestic environment with contaminated water and human waste, exposing them to a host of biological pathogens and chemical hazards, including when disposing of their own family’s waste.

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War, Conflict and Displacement

War creates multiple hardships for women. Not only are they vulnerable to gender-based violence during war and armed conflict, they also suffer disproportionately in postconflict situations, especially if they become widowed. Indeed, war and other conflict may serve to further diminish women’s already precarious claim on ‘inheritance.’ Often as a result of conflict, houses are abandoned or destroyed, title deeds or other vital papers lost, family members killed, with nothing and no one to support the woman’s claim to be able to ‘inherit’ marital land and housing.

In addition, when violent conflicts occur, many women who own land jointly with their husbands lose any proof of joint ownership, making their restitution claims much more difficult to prove and process. Once again, as in other cases, if a woman’s husband dies as a result of the conflict, his relatives may simply seize the home and the land. The enormous scale of recent conflicts in several African countries makes housing, land and property a pressing issue for millions of African women affected by these conflict.

Zimbabwe

The Housing Rights of African to a million people lost their homes, their sources of livelihood, or both. For women, the affects were especially dire. Despite laws to the contrary, women in Zimbabwe – in particular, married women – rarely gain access to housing, land and property of their own. Women and Law in Southern Africa (WLSA) Zimbabwe has found several reasons why women do not or cannot claim their rights, ranging from lack of resources to a culture of silence surrounding violations of women’s rights.

In recent years, Zimbabwe has been the focus of international attention in connection with housing and land issues. In May 2005, the Government of Zimbabwe embarked on a massive and illconceived campaign of forced evictions to ‘clean up’ its cities known as Operation Murambatsvina (which literally means ‘drive out rubbish’). The United Nations special envoy on Human Settlement Issues in Zimbabwe estimated that close 10

Sudan impunity. Housing rights violations have been no exception.

Darfur is home to 6.5 million people and over one third of them have lost their homes due to conflict.

In Sudan, conflicting and/or multiple systems of customary law too often fail to recognise women’s rights to ownership of housing and land. For female returnees, many problems arise and in many cases they are not allowed to acquire lands in their own right. In some cases, the son or another male relative is allowed to acquire the land instead of the woman.

Sudan is today one of the world’s most bitterly divided countries, and in recent years the crisis in Darfur has received considerable international attention as the human rights situation has deteriorated into nothing short of a catastrophe.

Grave human rights violations have been perpetrated daily in Darfur, and with almost total

Refugee and Displaced Women Restitution, Resettlement and Return

About Us COHRE’s mission is to ensure the full enjoyment of the human right to adequate housing for everyone, everywhere, including preventing forced evictions of persons, families and communities from their homes or lands.

Under international human rights standards, it is incumbent upon all States to ensure the equal right of men and women, and the equal right of boys and girls, to the enjoyment of housing, land and property restitution in all aspects, including voluntary return in safety and dignity; legal security of tenure; property ownership; equal access to ‘inheritance’; as well as the use, control of and access to housing, land and property.

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The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) Women and Housing Rights Progtamme 83 rue de Montbrillant 1202 Geneva, Switzerland Phone: +41.22.734.1028 ¡ Fax:+41.22.733.8336 ¡ Email: women@cohre.org www.cohre.org/women 12