1 Discussant Remarks from Margaret Owen, Widows for Peace ...

Discussant Remarks from Margaret Owen, Widows for Peace through Democracy (WPD)
for Overseas Development Institute's Chronic Poverty Research Centre,
Inheritance Rights Roundtable, October 11, 2010
Apologies for being out of the country and for the lateness and informality of this response. I only
received the papers to be presented at this Roundtable late Friday evening due to various
technology and communications problems, but I do very much want to share this response with
you, which is relevant to all of the papers, with two comments raised particularly in response to the
Peterman paper on Tanzania, the only paper I had the opportunity to really read through.
I note that Widows for Peace through Democracy is currently preparing a filing with The CEDAW
through their Inquiry Procedure on the systemic discrimination against widows in inheritance,
property and land rights and the failure to modify traditional attitudes towards Widowhood, in
collaboration with WPD's partners in Tanzania. Our Tanzanian team leader is Dr. Monica E.
Magoke-Mhoja, an Advocate of the High Court of Tanzania, an expert on inheritance rights in
Tanzania, co-founder and current Trustee of the Women's Legal Aid Centres of Tanzania, and
UNIFEM's contact person in Tanzania. Magoke-Mhoja is working in close conjunction with Edda
B. Mariki, Executive Director of the Tanzania Women and Children's Welfare Centre, a nongovernmental
legal rights and social welfare organization and our plans for the in-country portion
of the Inquiry effort also include coordination with a wide variety of additional widows' and
women's groups. The effort has initial funding from The Lipman-Miliband Trust.
The main points I wish to convey to researchers: 1) the importance of studying the underlying
barriers on the ground to ensuring inheritance rights for widows: harmful traditional practices and
customary laws, and the accompanying lack of access to justice 2) the need for you to create closer
relationships with widows and their organizations - both as subject matter and as key sources.
Even in the countries with inheritance laws on the books, where there are plural justice systems,
widow's lives are determined by interpretations of custom, religion, and tradition at the local level,
within the shackles of Patriarchy. The Traditional Courts, even if widows try to get justice there,
will often be biased or corrupted by the influence of powerful men in the community, and, even if
they uphold a complaint, do little to implement the opinion. In Tanzania, one widow was brave
enough to pursue her case on property and inheritance rights up to the High Court, where it was
dismissed. Widows contemplating accessing justice face barriers of cost, affordability and distance,
as well as stigma and shame. The choice of widows who do attempt to access justice, whether at the
Traditional Court level or in modern courts, risk increasing their vulnerability to physical, sexual
and mental violence, even death by stoning or beating, especially when accused as witches.
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These papers are excellent academic studies, but they appear to miss the main obstacle to raising
the status of widows and effectuating meaningful change (see the Widowhood report in the UN
DAW Women 2000 series which I authored for amplification): Widows must be supported to have
a voice, to be able to be represented, to articulate their needs, to describe their situations even
though it means making allegations about malfeasance by their own relatives. WPD has been
arguing for donors and governments to pick up on this message for many years, but there has been
no proper action. Furthermore, for the most part, national and international women’s NGOs are
equally reluctant to “unpeel the layers" surrounding womanhood and allow space and resources so
that categories of the most needy women - such as widows, who carry alone the responsibilities of
caring for and nurturing their families - are specifically included and involved.
With regard to the statement on page 23 of the Peterman paper on Tanzania: "Women's property
and inheritance rights are now on the development agenda and being incorporated into research and
program implementation plans among donors and other international organizations" which
Peterman then does go on to qualify, women's property and inheritance rights do not seem, to me,
to adequately be on the development agenda but we can argue that, while widows' property and
inheritance rights issues are clearly not on the development agenda at all. Donors do not support
work in this area. There is no discussion of marital status in the donor community, the UN system
(other than a few beginning bits and pieces in the Office of the High Commissioner for Human
Rights and The CEDAW), or in the international NGO community. There is a reluctance, even a
refusal, to acknowledge that women are not a homogenous group, and that particular sub-categories
of women, such as widows and the wives of the missing are recipients of specific mal-treatments
and therefore need specific policy responses. We call upon academic researchers to increase study
of marital status and Widowhood in all its complexities and diversities - throughout the life cycle
(child widows, mid-life widows, older widows), in different household structures (family units,
extended family units, polygynous family units), in different cultures (for instance, in which wives
have been central to or excluded from economic activity before the death of their husbands) to
enable truly thorough exploration of the impact of Widowhood on widows and their children.
I was also struck, in the Peterman paper, the only one I had time to really read, by the fact that I
could see no reference to the efforts made by widows to “band together” and be counted - either on
the village, national, regional or international levels. There are growing numbers of grassroots and
national widows' organizations advocating for their rights, either under the nomenclature of
widows, "single women" or as part of other issues, such as "women living with HIV," particularly
in sub-Saharan Africa, Southern Asia and conflict-affected countries outside those regions; Widows
for Peace through Democracy was a founding member of the one regional NGO whose mission is
advocacy for widows' rights: SANWED (Southern Asian Network for Widows Empowered
Through Development); and WPD is the one international NGO advocating for the rights of
widows globally, along with its sister organisation, Global Action on Widowhood. It is essential
that widows be acknowledged as the vital participants that they are, as they actively build better
lives for themselves, their families, their communities, and their countries, rather than as victims we
can all too easily sympathise with and then ignore. Just as the dire circumstances of widows have
been politically invisible, so has their tremendous activity in the face of adversity. We call upon the
academic and research worlds to allow that invisibility no longer and to acknowledge and study
these burgeoning organizations and their growing impact.
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The failure at the UN level and at the national levels of Governments and women’s NGOs to either
discuss discrimination based on marital status or to acknowledge the growing number of widows'
and women's groups working to fight such discrimination meant that, for instance, the Outcome
Document emerging from the UN General Assembly’s Summit on the MDGs failed to give any
attention to the need to address marital status and Widowhood - Widowhood being one of the root
causes of poverty as many women who were not poor before the death of their spouse suddenly are
stripped of their assets, socially isolated and discriminated against, and women who were poor
before the death of their spouse become even more so afterwards, due to the harmful traditional
practices and customary laws that curtail their freedom of movement and end their social networks,
in addition to reducing their meagre store of property. The issues of Widowhood cross-cut the eight
MDGs, as well as all action areas of the Beijing Platform for Action, and deserve attention.
Not only must marital status be addressed at the local, national and international levels, but national
Governments and NGOs, and the international community, including the UN System and iNGOs,
must also commit to combating those customary laws and traditional practices which violate
universal human rights standards. The priority must be on the lives of the persecuted, rather than on
maintaining cultural practices that harm people. All too often, we have heard that nothing can be
done about various forms of discrimination, including inheritance rights, because they stem from
customary law or a traditional practice. We call for academic research to explore the underpinnings
of these cultural remnants and of attitude change. We call for development of policies and
programmes that work on attitude change and culture change. We call for establishing mechanisms
to eliminate impunity so every individual in every family is free to exercise their human rights.
In order to have the strength to combat the severe discrimination that widows face, Governments,
donors, the UN, and the international community must support widows as they band together both
financially and politically so that they can have a voice and influence policy. The international
community must work to ensure that widows' organizations are part of the design, development,
implementation, monitoring, and evaluation of policies and programmes, that they are integral
components of outreach efforts to inform people of available programmes and services, and that
they are funded to play these essential roles. The international community must not only fund and
listen to these groups, but also commit to forming such groups in areas in which there are
significant numbers of widows and yet, for one reason or another, no such organisations yet exist.
It is also critical to fill in the gaps in data on the numbers of widows and their lives, support
systems, coping strategies, and experiences of violence, persecution and oppression. Data on
Widowhood is not only of importance to academic researchers for understanding the mechanisms
of poverty; it is also an essential political advocacy tool and inextricably linked with making
progress. Yet capturing data on widows is challenging. Because of the discrimination enacted
against widows, widows go into hiding, are discouraged from social interaction, or are otherwise
hard to reach. It is only when widows themselves are supported financially and politically to gather
information, working with Government ministries in equal partnership, that it will become possible
to create a truly accurate and comprehensive view of widows, their numbers and their lives. Only
then will the real picture emerge, revealing needs and roles, and exposing practices that national
laws must criminalise. To bring this point home to the researchers here, I hope upon reading this
paper that all of you begin to explore funded roles for widows' groups to serve as developers of data
to use in your research on the ground and evaluators of the results of such research.
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There is also an urgent need for education of whole communities on citizens' and civil rights, and
the fact that these rights are inalienable and not to be restricted based on marital status or any other
arbitrary criteria. School curricula should incorporate training on international norms and on the
importance of universal and unalienable human rights. Education programs must be developed on
widows' rights and delivered to judicial and political leadership and all levels of staff to educate and
train personnel in human rights, from lawyers in training at law schools to police officers, security
personnel in refugee and IDP camps, humanitarian relief workers, to the judges, opinion and
religious leaders, village chiefs and Traditional Court magistrates. Research can assist in
developing the most effective curricular material to be delivered using the most effective
pedagogical methods in the most effective settings to reach diverse audiences.
While we are thrilled that Overseas Development Institute's Chronic Poverty Research Centre is
now focusing on inheritance rights of women, in other words, primarily widows (sometimes
daughters), as a key in the intergenerational transmission of poverty that leads families to stay
trapped in chronic poverty (I remember speaking here 16 years ago on these issues!), I fear that
there is too academic a focus and the policies and programmes emerging from this important
research will not reflect the urgent situation on the ground without the input of widows themselves,
as well as practitioners on the ground. We call on the academic and research communities to do
more connecting with widows' groups and with practitioners in the formulation of your research
and in evaluation of the results. More generally, evaluations of programmes and services should
always include the voices of service recipients, practitioners, and other target audiences.
When people on the ground find that the laws are too often irrelevant and the justice systems
incapable of delivering justice, then researchers focusing on studying these systems must do more,
including more than all of the international mechanisms - the Beijing Platform For Action, the
United Nations Security Council Resolution 1325 on gender and peace and security, the United
Nations Millennium Development Goals, and even The CEDAW (The Convention for the
Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women) - have done so far (i.e. not as much as
we all would have hoped) to change individual lives. Actions to alleviate the suffering of the most
vulnerable - women without adult men in their families, in particular widows - have been stymied
time and time again, in forum after forum, by harmful traditional practices and customary laws, in
other words, by patriarchic power structures. Therefore, there must be research on policies and
programmes that create a pathway towards eradication of such harmful traditional practices and
customary laws in ways that leave cultures feeling whole, yet simultaneously allowing the full
participation of widows and other excluded and persecuted people.
There is a tremendous gap between the academic papers focused on understanding the mechanisms
that lead to chronic poverty and the heart of the problem that widows live with - widows are
invisible, silenced, unheard, and barred from civic participation and from Governments properly
taking action on these issues by Patriarchy. Governments are not criminalizing the propertygrabbing,
chasing off, degrading and harmful traditional practices or gender based violence that
widows experience. Widows, and women, around the world are crying out for impunity to end, and
the world does not seem to hear their cries or to translate them into action. In order for
Governments to change course, the voices of widows must be listened to and heard, so widows
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must be supported and funded to build their collective voice and raise it in increasingly powerful
ways to finally reach Governments and the international community.
The best method that I have seen in my 16 years in the field is widows banding together and taking
political action, building political victories from numbers and numbers from data collection. There
are possibly other effective methods, and I urge you to search for them, but this is where I have
seen change taking place. I leave you with the following example of change slowly taking place: In
Nepal, widows are included on the committee working on the National Action Plan to implement
the UN SCR 1325 resolution. Our partner in Nepal, Women for Human Rights - Single Womens
Group, has worked hard to obtain law reforms on pension equality and other areas, in addition to
working to eliminate harmful traditional practices, such as forbidding widows to wear colors. A
major factor in WHR-SWG's ability to obtain these political results is the tremendous growth they
experienced in 2008 as a result of the Mapping and Profiling survey they conducted, through which
they reached 44,000 widows in 69% of Nepal's districts. This project allowed WHR-SWG to
employ widows to simultaneously obtain quantitative and qualitative data and educate and mobilise
these 44,000 widows as members of their organization. They continue to salary "catalyst" widows
in 22 regions of the country. In June 2010, WHR obtained a commitment from the Government of
Nepal to include data on widows in the national census-taking of 2011 for the first time ever. And
the work continues…
Thank you.
Margaret Owen, Widows for Peace through Democracy
MARGARET OWEN is the Founder and Director of Widows for Peace through Democracy (WPD), and has worked for widows
rights for over 16 years. She wrote the first book on international widowhood, A World of Widows (1996, Zed Books), as well as the
first UN report on the status of widows "Widowhood: Invisible Women, Secluded or Excluded" for the UNDAW (UN Division for
the Advancement of Women) Women 2000 series. She chaired the first international workshop on widowhood issues for the Fourth
World Women's Conference in Beijing. Out of that workshop, she founded Empowering Widows through Development (now
Widows Rights International), the first international organization for widows rights. Margaret Owen annually, for over 10 years, has
organized an international panel of leaders of widows' organizations at the CSW sessions in NYC, often in collaboration with
UNIFEM and UNDAW. She was an organizer of the first International Conference on Widows' Rights held in London in 2001, part
of the team establishing the South Asian Network for Widows Empowered through Development, the first regional network for
widows, and speaks at conferences and seminars on and researches Widowhood in Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Iraq, Kosovo,
Nepal, Pakistan, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Uganda, Zambia,, et alia (partial list).
After 9/11, Margaret Owen re-focused her Widowhood work on conflict and post-conflict reconstruction, founding a new
organization (now called Widows for Peace through Democracy) in partnership with 19 widows' organizations in 16 countries. In
2005, she drafted a "Widows Charter" which has been used by partner groups as a tool to lobby for law reform in developing
countries. She created an innovative Mapping and Profiling methodology in 2006, which is designed to collect both quantitative and
qualitative data on Widowhood, and to employ widows to reach out to other widows in a peer context and conduct the survey. She
was an advisor to WPD partner, widows' organization Women for Human Rights - Single Women's Group in Nepal, as they
conducted the first national mapping and profiling of widows in the world in 2008. She has just formed Global Action on
Widowhood, a sister organisation to Widows for Peace through Democracy based in the United States.
Margaret Owen is a member of the UK Afghan Woman's Link, the International Working Group of the UK Women's National
Commission and the UK Bar's Human Rights Committee. Prior to her work on Widowhood, she worked as an international lawyer
on women's status in the areas of immigration and asylum, family planning and abortion rights, education and employment.
Contact: Margaret Owen, Director, Widows for Peace through Democracy, 36 Faroe Road, London, W14 OEP, United Kingdom
+44 (0) 207 603-0733, director.wpd@gmail.com, www.widowsforpeace.org
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