Related items
Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.
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Expanding Women's Access to Land and Housing in Urban AreasEvidence is mounting that secure property rights have positive effects for poor people in general and women in particular. The aim of this report is to review what is known about women s access to and control over land and real property in urban settings, identifying approaches to strengthening property rights that enhance women s agency, and sharing key lessons. Section two synthesizes the evidence on urban women s priorities with respect to land and housing; the factors that influence women s access to and control over land and secure tenure, including legal and institutional frameworks and social relationships, especially within the family; and what is known about the extent to which women have access to, control over and use of urban land and housing, and through what forms of tenure. In section three, recent reform of laws, policies and practices to meet the needs of poor people in urban areas, especially women, will be assessed. Section four provides a short discussion of some of the strategies, tactics and alliances that are being adopted to bring about legal reforms and to influence the content, design and implementation of programs in urban areas. The report draws on successive research projects by the author and her colleagues on land and housing markets and policies, urban livelihoods, and urban politics and governance in a variety of contexts, in particular Rakodi (2010).
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The Illusion of Inclusion : Women's Access to Rights in Northern KenyaThis paper shows how official laws concerning justice for women, can be difficult to apply when they are not socially acknowledged, contextualized, or received, and therefore have minimal impact on women's lives. It demonstrates that the inclusion of women through international conventions, domestic legal reform, and gender quotas in participatory processes, is illusory. While these are all important instruments in women's empowerment, the paper calls upon access to justice practitioners and policy makers to place equal emphasis on fostering the practical implementation of laws and to emphasize opportunities for increased equality in informal systems.
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Strengthening Economic Rights and Women's Occupational Choice : The Impact of Reforming Ethiopia's Family LawThis paper evaluates the impact of
 strengthening legal rights on the types of economic
 opportunities that are pursued. Ethiopia changed its family
 law, requiring both spouses' consent in the
 administration of marital property, removing the ability of
 a spouse to deny permission for the other to work outside
 the home, and raising women's minimum age of marriage.
 Thus both access to resources and the removal of
 restrictions on employment served to strengthen women's
 bargaining position within the household and their ability
 to pursue economic opportunities. Although this reform now
 applies nationally, it was initially rolled out in the two
 chartered cities and three of Ethiopia's nine regions.
 Using nationally representative household surveys from just
 prior to the reform and five years later allows for a
 difference-in-difference estimation of the reform's
 impact. The analysis finds that women were relatively more
 likely to work in occupations that require work outside the
 home, employ more educated workers, and in paid and
 full-time jobs where the reform had been enacted,
 controlling for time and location effects. As the relative
 increase in women's participation in these activities
 was 15-24 percent higher in areas where the reform was
 carried out, the magnitude of the impact is significant too.