Source: allAfrica
"Cultural practices and customary laws in Southern Africa Development Committee (SADC) limit women's ability to access, own and control means of production such as land and livestock."

The above statement is based on the latest findings by Gender Links (GL), a Southern African non-governmental organisation (NGO) that is committed to ensuring that women and men in the region are able to participate equally in all aspects of public and private life by 2015.

According to Gender Links, the inability by women to access means of production has had an impact on their economic independence and ability to move out of poverty.

Statistics indicate that women's access to land for food production is critical to the welfare of the entire region as women are primarily responsible for maintaining households.

Women provide 70-80 per cent of all agricultural labour and 90 per cent of all labour involving food production in the region.

Unequal access to land and other productive resources such as livestock, markets, credit and modern technology are among the most significant forms of economic inequality between men and women and have consequences for women as social and political sectors.

Under customary law subscribed by most countries in Southern Africa which operate dual legal systems, - a woman loses her rights to own property upon marriage as ownership passes to her husband and then her male children.

Speaking recently at a one day workshop for journalists at Nena Lodge in Lusaka themed 'Provision of The SADC Protocol on Economy -the situation in Zambia', Gender Link facilitator Madube Siyauya bemoaned the unequal distribution on resources based on gender.

"Because women's ties to land are mediated by their relationship to men in patrilineal societies, their attempts to assert their rights in ways that challenge customary land tenure systems are most often received as an attempt to disrupt society," Ms Siyauya said.

She observed that in the patriarchal societies, women generally do not inherit land from their fathers or their husbands.

Fathers will not leave land to their daughters for fear that their girl child may marry outside the clan and take the land with them.

Husbands often do not leave land to their wives for the same reason: Land must remain within the clan at all costs even if it means disinheriting one's daughter or wife.

Ms Siyauya noted that in the Zambian scenario, it is easy for women to own land in the urban areas as they can simply purchase a piece of land as compared to rural areas where land inheritance for women is still a thorny issue.

She said even if a woman acquires land with her husband and invests her life in cultivating it, she cannot claim ownership to the property.

Since women are mostly completely dependent on men to access land, women who are childless, single, widowed, disabled, separated/divorced, or those who only have daughters are particularly vulnerable.

Across the SADC region, governments have instituted legal reforms to address the issue of women's land ownership.

The results have been varied and point to the need for a more pro-active approach which includes addressing the negative effects of customary law

But to do this though, suggestions are that governments would have to abandon their dual legal systems, develop and uphold progressive constitutional laws that would provide for equality between men and women.

However, in Botswana where the Government has amended the land laws, women have not enjoyed equal access to business lease plots and commercial/industrial licenses.

Until recently only 35.6 per cent commercial and industrial plot holders in that country were women Despite a quota of 20 percent land allocation to women in Zimbabwe being a key principle in the land reform agenda which began in 1998, by the end of the Fast Truck Land Programme in 2002, the land quota for women had not been legislated and the number of women allocated land was dismally low countrywide.

In South Africa the Department of Land Affairs has put in place a gender policy which seeks to ensure that gender equality is addressed within all aspects of land reform.

However, the 2004 SADC report on the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action noted that some policies may disadvantage women as the intention is to restore land to those who had land rights previously, most of whom are not women.

The Tanzanian Government revised the country's land laws in 2004 to create value for land and to allow mortgage of land with consent of spouses and tribunals whose composition must include not less than 43 per cent of women. This was in an obvious attempt to address gender discrimination in land rights but the implementation of policies and laws have yielded mixed results and women's land rights remain tenuous.

In Namibia, the Communal Land Act (2002) provides for a surviving spouse to remain on the property (thus referring to immovable poverty) but does not refer to movable property.

According to a report by Barbara Lopi of the Southern African Research and Documentation Centre (SARDC) and Women in Development in Southern Africa Awareness (WIDSSA) programme, provisions to assist women who lose their land when widowed is not as rife as property grabbing.

On gender budgeting, the report states that the central plank of gender budgeting is that because of the different locations of men and women in society and in the economy, no budget line is neutral. Budgets normally reflect the priorities of a nation, and often of the people taking the decisions.

According to surveys, budgets are a good barometer of the extent to which gender has been mainstreamed into policies and programmes.

Its conclusion is that the problem is often that discrepancies hide behind numbers that on the face of it look reasonable.

But in reality, the numbers mask underlying resource allocations which at worst perpetuate gender inequalities and at best do little to challenge them.

The findings state that gender budgeting involves both an analysis of locations between sectors (such as defense versus social allocations) and within sectors to determine the impact.

According to the findings, although still in their early stages, gender budget initiatives have scored important successes, ranging from actual expenditure re-allocations to opening traditionally secretive budget processes to much greater transparency and accountability.

The report suggests re-prioritisation of expenditure as one way of striking a balance on gender budgeting.

Basing on the findings, for instance in February 1996, the South African Department of Finance committed itself to considering the reallocation of military expenditure to support women's economic advancement.

The department reduced expenditure on defence from 9.1 per cent of total government spending in 1992/93 to 5.7 per cent in 1997/98.

Spending on social services increased from 43.8 per cent of total spending in 1992/93 to 46.9 percent in 1997/98.

With the political will that is seemingly being shown by some SADC countries such as Zambia, stakeholders are keenly waiting to see which nations in the region will be able to meet the 2015 gender parity in all sectors of development.

• Zambia