The Right of Women to Land and Housing in Cameroon’s North West Region: A Legal and Socio-political Analysis

International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue II, February 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186

The Right of Women to Land and Housing in Cameroon’s North West Region: A Legal and Socio-political Analysis

Lidwina Dope Nyadjroh Gabsa
Department of English Law, University of Yaounde II-Soa, Cameroon

Abstract: This study is a contribution to the literature on patterns of women empowerment within the framework of a legal and socio-political approach. It uses the women’s right to ownership of land and housing property as a yardstick of effective women empowerment in the grasslands region of Western Cameroon, a region known to be dominated by patriarchal practices. It finds that women’s right to ownership of property has been disproportionately shaped by legal and socio-political factors. From a legal point of view, women like men have the right to ownership of property but from a socio-political stand point, it is not always the case. There is a significant mismatch between women property rights and their effective ownership of property. Women in North West Cameroon make use of property but hardly secure it in their own names. The paper is inviting feminist stakeholders such as government and NGOs to effectively address implementation of ownership procedures and in particular those regarding ownership of land and housing.

Keywords: Land/housing, North West, Private ownership, Property, Usufruct, Women

I. INTRODUCTION

Researches on women ownership of property in the Cameroon grasslands to which the North West belong have not been deeply rooted. Indeed, though scholars described political, economic and social institutions of the area, they were more concerned with the general functions of those institutions. Miriam Goheen has focused on gender as crucial in politics in the grass fields in her work Men own the fields, women own the crops… Using a hegemonic perspective, she finds that the real counter-hegemonic discourse to ‘male power’ comes from women. However, she does not concretely reveal the element of power in the women of Nso (area of research) i.e. in terms of ownership of land and housing property, though her analysis notes amongst others, that the 80s and 90s triggered off awareness and democracy among men and women. She seems to be concluding that the wave of democracy in the 90s represented a threat to the ruling regime—so that its survival thereto

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