Last week, women’s rights advocates from around the world gathered in Istanbul at the 12th AWID (Association for Women in Development) International Forum. Held every 3-4 years, the International Forum is the largest event of its kind, providing women’s rights advocates an opportunity to connect and learn.
This year’s International Forum was significantly focused on its theme, Transforming Economic Power to Advance Women’s Rights and Justice. UN Women has described, “Women make up more than half the world’s population, but the majority of them live in poverty. For their lives to change, they need access to and control of economic resources and political power.” Without access to economic resources, women cannot realize their basic rights.
However, protection of women’s equal rights to property, land, and housing is critical to a transformation of economic power. According to UNICEF, women perform 66% of the world’s work and produce 50% of its food, but earn only 10% of the world’s income and own 1% of property. Moreover, as explained by the Commission on Legal Empowerment of the Poor, supported by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), “Even when women do have legal property rights, their actual control of land may be tenuous, since men often mediate access.” Women’s inability to own, dispose of, and inherit property creates and perpetuates economic dependence on men.
This situation is particularly severe in the context of HIV/AIDS. Without access to property, land, and housing, women may be trapped in abusive relations where they are less empowered to protect themselves from HIV infection or seek treatment, or they may face increased vulnerability upon a husband’s death and forced to participate in widow inheritance (where the widow herself is “inherited”), polygyny, or high-risk work to survive. Impoverished women also have reduced capacity to cope with the disease.
Many international human rights instruments include protection for women’s property, land, and housing rights, yet many countries disregard these obligations. To demand government accountability, advocates must know and understand the rights espoused in these instruments.
To bridge this gap, the Open Society Foundations joined forces with the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), the Huairou Commission, and UNDP to develop a manual, Tools for Change: Applying UN Standards to Secure Women’s Housing, Land, and Property Rights in the Context of HIV/AIDS. This manual brings together international human rights instruments on women’s property and inheritance for easy reference and use by advocates and provides an analysis of key concepts, rights, and means of enforcement. The publication draws on the voices of grassroots women from Peru, the Philippines, and South Africa, working together to fight violations in their communities, to explain the various rights and their uses in practical terms. It additionally provides examples of the integration of human rights in advocacy and enforcement strategies within legal, political, and social spaces from around the world.
We hope this manual will help translate standards into action and rights into transformative tools for change.