Summary

Statutorily supported rights to land and other landed resources are accepted as crucial in agrarian society and no less so to women than to men. Critical shifts are affecting rural resource rights in Africa at this time through widespread reform in land, forestry and other laws. The cutting edge of transformation affecting women is in emerging new provision for wives to hold family property as co-owners with their husbands, a provision that could play a main role in revitalising smallholder agriculture in the continent. Recognition that equity in domestic land relations may ultimately be a prerequisite to the modernisation of subsistence agriculture in agrarian economies is the thesis underlying analysis of legal texts here. More pervasive improvement in women’s resource rights is emerging though indirect changes in law and particularly those that alter the balance of authority over land and landed resources between state and people, with broadly democratising effect. Important for women is the greater accessibility to tenure administration, dispute resolution machinery and resource management functions occurring through devolution of centres of control from centre to periphery. Also important is the changing status of customary rights in land under new laws coupled with clearer constitutional restriction upon practices which discriminate against women’s land rights and through which family and group tenure may in future be secured. Although these developments are still new in law and far from widespread in implementation, the 21 st century opens with opportunities for rural women to secure tenure over local resource that were not even hinted at a mere decade past. Making the most of these opportunities and promoting them further will be the main challenge of this first decade of the new millennium.