Building Sustainable Peace and Prosperity through Women's Land Tenure Security: A Zambian Case Study
Publisher: Georgetown Institute for Women, Peace & Security
Author(s): Roslyn Warren
Date: 2013
Topics: Gender, Governance, Land, Livelihoods, Protection and Access to Justice
Countries: Zambia
Land security continues to be an understudied issue, despite the fact that conflicts over land have been part of human history since ancient times. Particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa, land redistribution and resettlement legacies continue to thwart efforts to build sustainable peace and security. While land insecurity stirs the potential for violent conflict and political upheaval,1 it also forces millions of people to live with daily insecurities. To this end, an even more neglected yet crucial issue related to land security is the inability of women to access land titling rights, to own land, and to secure their land interests across the developing world. Lack of understanding in this regard hampers informed decision-making, policy design, and program implementation at local, state and international levels.
While Zambians pride themselves on their country’s peaceful history, land insecurity in Zambia, as in many other societies, spurs the potential for violence. Zambia represents an interesting case study in this regard because unequal land-tenure security along gender lines also intertwines with broader issues of human security, stability, and peace. This report, based largely on field research, offers new and unique insight into the plight of rural Zambian women whose inadequate access to land rights intersects with poverty, environmental degradation, national food security, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, conflict susceptibility and the economic productive potential of the state. Zambia is one of the world’s poorest countries. It ranks #163 out of 186 countries on the Human Development Report, which uses indices ranging from maternal mortality rates to GDP per capita to measure and compare the overall development of states across the globe.2 Without land-tenure security, people generally, but the poor especially, cannot “recover from harmful, unpredictable events,”3 making them exceptionally vulnerable to economic and environmental shocks. Because women grow about 90 percent of the food in Africa,4 their land-tenure security is a “key link in the chain from household food production to national food security.”5 In addition, when land rights are informally documented, the stigma of HIV/AIDS places women in a “precarious” situation—they often stand “accused of bringing the malady into the family,” making them vulnerable to losing everything upon their spouse’s death.6 Failure to understand these connections not only feminizes poverty in Zambia but also erodes Zambia’s potential productive capital. Although current Zambian land practices impact many dimensions of human security and essentially shut out more than 50 percent of the native population’s capacity to produce, there remains little appreciation for how women’s lack of land security contributes to state fragility.
To shed light on this issue, this paper lays out a range of key findings and proposed solutions.