Women in Tanzania better off due to land reform

New-wave land reforms in sub-Saharan Africa help protect women’s rights to land. This is the argument of DIIS postdoc Rasmus Hundsbæk Pedersen in the article A Less Gendered Access to Land?, which has just been published in Journal of Development Policy Review.

With their decentralised administration institutions and anti-discriminatory legal frameworks these contemporary land reforms are different than the state-centric reform of the past, which disadvantaged women.

Based on field research into the implementation of Tanzania’s 1999 Land Acts, it identifies an institutional reconfiguration in which the formal institutions are gradually strengthened and the customary institutions slowly changed. This does not in itself pose a threat to women’s access to land. Some women, who are otherwise often perceived to be weak, are left better-off. Nevertheless, access to land becomes socially more uneven.