Procuring Meaningful Land Rights for the Women of Rwanda

The author discusses issues of land reform and gender equality in the context of post- genocide Rwanda. Prior to land reforms in 1999 that gave women the same property rights as men, Rwandan women were not allowed to inherit or own land, and only had secondary property rights through their fathers or husbands. The author argues that despite these legal changes, there are still major social obstacles to gender equality that are manifested through resistance to granting equal inheritance rights to daughters and sons, adherence to assumptions of female inferiority, and the persistence of informal marriages in which wives remain unprotected by the new law. The author identifies land scarcity, vestiges of discriminatory legal systems, and gendered power structures as underlying causes of these social obstacles, and suggests that many currently proposed solutions are inadequate because they fail to address these underlying causes. The author suggests that this discussion of property rights and barriers to gender equality is not limited to Rwanda and can be applied to the international development community. Aparna Polavarapu, Procuring Meaningful Land Rights for the Women of Rwanda (2011) 14 Yale Human Rts & Dev LJ 105.