Rwanda’s laws provide opportunities for gender equity by granting equal inheritance rights to sons and daughters and protection of a surviving spouse’s and children’s rights to property. However, customary systems continue to govern over family and land matters and often discriminate...

Recent laws, including Mozambique’s Family Law and Land Law, provide important protection and opportunities for equitable property and inheritance rights, including for women in so-called de facto unions (cohabitation without marriage). A key policy debate in the revision of Mozambique’s...

This paper is comprised of a literature review and an annotated bibliography of past and current empirical and theoretical scholarship and policy analysis concerning the de jure and de facto rules and norms of inheritance practices in African societies, particularly with regard to physical...

In many Sub-Saharan African societies, inheritance is one of the most common means by which physical property is transferred from one generation to another. As such, policy initiatives concerning the intergenerational transmission of poverty (IGT poverty) would do well to attend to how...

Customary law governs the majority of Ghanaians' cases of intestate (no will) inheritance due to customary governance of land and the limited reach of statutory structures.Land in Ghana belongs to lineage groups and therefore cannot be inherited without the approval of customary governance...

Ugandan statutory law contains some progressive as well as constraining elements for the protection of spouses' and children's inheritance rights. Opportunities exist to address limitations through the revision of Uganda's Succession Act, and in allocating budget resources to implement...

Several cultural groups in Kenya claim customary inheritance practices that favour males over females and Kenya's Constitution allows customary laws to apply to matters of personal law, including property devolution. There is ongoing debate over removing this recognition in favour of a blanket...