Tajik Women Seek Greater Land Rights

Women in Tajikistan are lobbying for changes to land legislation to give them more control over the farms they run. 

The call for reform came during a meeting hosted by IWPR in the Tajik capital Dushanbe. 

Women in rural Tajikistan might once have been confined to the home by traditional patriarchal attitudes, but that changed during the 1992-97 civil war when men in particular were displaced, and during the years of male labour emigration that followed. 

But women trying to run a farm run up against many obstacles when they try to assert their rights in a dispute, acquire a new lease on a piece of land, or secure a bank loan to buy seed and farming equipment. 

The law does not discriminate, but in practice women own much less land and are less able to get credit.

There is no private ownership of farmland, only leasing arrangements in Tajikistan.

Women’s groups want to change the law so that land use is equated with other forms of property in terms of individual rights. This would mean that in the case of divorce, for example, a couple’s land rights would be divisible in the same way as their other common assets.

The NGOs lobbying for reform plan to meet members of parliament in August to try to persuade them to draft the required legislative changes.

The audio programme, in Russian and Tajik, went out on national radio stations in Tajikistan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.