Ahead of the game: land tenure reform in Rwanda and the process of securing women's land rights

Abstract

The Rwandan Constitution of 2003, the National Land Policy of 2004 and the Organic Land Law of 2005 all contain clear provisions which add up to a mandate for gender equality in land rights and set out a context in which all land shall be registered and rights gained under different means of access to land shall be considered equal. The Rwandan Succession Law of 1999 had already established the principle of equal inheritance rights to land for men and women. Articles from these four core documents together comprise the new body of land policy and law in Rwanda which is currently in the process of being implemented. This paper argues that an iterative approach to planning for the implementation of land tenure reform in Rwanda over a long period of research and consultations, including field consultations and subsequent “trial interventions”, and involving both government and civil society, has enabled the issue of how to secure women's land rights to be more fully considered within the overall land tenure reform process. This comes in a country with particular and unique post-Genocide circumstances that enabled women to gain their new land inheritance rights on paper early on. Evidence gathered by the authors suggests that these paper rights are already beginning to affect social relations and land inheritance patterns in practice. Moreover, women's land rights retain a prominence on the political agenda in Rwanda, positing an “enabling” environment for some crucial articles in the secondary legislation required for implementation to be drafted.