Women's Inheritance Network (WIN)

The WIN website is one tool used to provide an interactive forum for exchange of legal and on-the-ground information on women's rights, inheritance, and property rights and HIV/AIDS among legal practitioners and activists in eastern and southern Africa and beyond. It includes details about court decisions and legislation and provides access to various resources. The website also includes interactive features such as a blog, designed to spark conversation amongst lawyers and activists, who can hopefully positively influence each other to make a concrete contribution towards mitigating the impact of HIV/AIDS on women in general and widows in particular.

WIN suggests that governments can take action to protect women’s property rights. For example:

• Enact legislation to protect women's property rights, implement such legislation, and monitor compliance.
• Launch public awareness campaigns to inform the people about women's equal property rights.
• Train judges, magistrates, police, and relevant local and national officials on laws relating to women's equal property rights and their responsibility to enforce them.
• Ensure that court systems can handle women's property rights claims fairly and efficiently.
• Establish national legal aid systems with the capacity to handle women's civil property claims.
• Establish shelters for domestic violence victims and women who have suffered property rights violations.
• Include in HIV/AIDS programmes information about the link between property rights violations and HIV/AIDS.
• Design programmes to address women's housing problems, especially those of widows, divorced or separated women, mothers, and HIV/AIDS-affected women.
• Establish gender units in all ministries.
• Ensure that private acts that violate women's property rights are investigated, prosecuted, and punished.

WIN contends that donor agencies must play a critical role in eliminating violations of women's property rights as they promote women’s human rights and economic development. They should:

• Work with governments to ensure that development policies and programmes are designed and implemented to promote women's property rights and that concrete steps are taken to eliminate discriminatory laws and customs that undermine development efforts, specifically in the area of women's equal property rights.
• Urge governments to enforce legal sanctions against those who violate women's property rights.
• Speak out publicly and emphatically in support of women's equal property rights and condemn violations of those rights.

Rights, Women, HIV/AIDS

WIN states that unequal property rights and related harmful customary practices violate international human rights law, which proscribes discrimination on the basis of sex.

According to WIN, the HIV/AIDS epidemic magnifies the devastation of property violations. HIV/AIDS preferentially claims the lives of young adults; in Africa, this mostly means married persons with children. Thus, millions of children are orphaned because of AIDS, and millions of women are widowed at a relatively young age, often having contracted HIV from their husbands. Widows may have to undergo customary "wife inheritance" or "cleansing" rituals - often involving unprotected sex - in order to keep their property, practices that put them at risk of contracting and spreading HIV. Domestic violence victims, who often tolerate abuse because they otherwise have little chance of keeping their property and staying in their homes, risk HIV exposure due to the coercive sex, inability to negotiate condom use, and impediments to seeking health services that tend to accompany domestic violence.