Women and access to land
ZAMBIAN GOVT WORKS WITH CIVIL SOCIETY TO CREATE GENDER EQUALITY
When a woman has access to and control over land and its revenue streams, she and her family benefit. Multiple studies have shown how women invest their land-based earnings in the health, nutrition and education of family members.
But for this to happen, customs that favour granting land to men must be altered. This requires both structural change, through for example government policies, and socio-cultural change.
The Zambian government has worked with civil society organisations to create gender equality and land governance framework. Through social networks and capacity building programmes gender equality is pursued in the allocation of land in customary tenure systems.
Zambia has two categories of land, state land and customary land. State land includes land in urban areas and land used for mining or nature conservation.
Customary land is administered by traditional leaders, such as chiefs and headpersons, according to customary law that is unwritten and based on local customs. Customary law is valid under the constitution. Any customary practice that contradicts the constitution is illegal.
Women in customary tenure systems have what are called secondary land rights. This is because Zambia’s 288 chiefs and village headpersons handle land issues and generally grant occupancy and use rights to men because they’re considered the head of household. A woman tends to get access by asking her husband, or another male relative, to use a portion of the allocated land.
Gender activists are working to increase the prevalence of women as primary land rights holders. Their work is being helped by the fact that Zambia has a supportive policy environment thanks to the 2016 constitution and the government’s gender policy.
The policies have created momentum for legal reform and new measures to promote gender equality in the land sector. Chiefs, court officials, and men and women at the grassroots level have access to new tools to reconceptualise how to work, live and develop their communities together.
Changing the land use pattern faces a number of challenges. One of them is that there isn’t proper documentation of boundaries, or even of who has rights to what. For example, customary land in Zambia is neither systematically mapped nor registered. This leaves boundaries between individual plots unclear.
International organisations are working with chiefs and community groups like the Zambia Land Alliance to create what are known as traditional land holding certificates. These recognise land rights at either the individual or household level. Certifications clarify rights, verify claims through boundary demarcation, and end with the issuance of a certificate. The certificates allow a woman’s name to be listed as the land’s primary rights holder.
The certificate is designed to reduce property grabbing and the common practice of expelling a woman from a piece of land after her husband’s death. Establishing a system that registers these certificates and makes rights public, would mean that women have a better chance of being protected.
Men often instruct their wives where to plant and when the cropping season is over, a woman might not be allowed to cultivate that same plot again and the husband will take it for his own cultivation.
Bringing together men and women within the household rather than maintaining separate fields, closes the gender gap.
Another type of programme works through village-level groups that promote women’s collective access to land.
Cynthia Caron is an assistant professor at the Clark University. This article was first published on The Conversation.