Extract from a message to opening plenary of the 2001 conference by Mrs Graça Machel
....My continent Africa has many widows, of all ages, in all conditions and degrees of poverty, isolation and need. In my own country Mozambique, the civil war left a legacy of hundreds and thousands of widows and fatherless children. The HIV/AIDS pandemic has devastated family life across the continent leaving uncountable numbers of orphans and placing an additional burden on older women, many of them widows, who have to take on the care of sick and dying children and grandchildren in need.
These brave and resilient women symbolise a situation which cuts across culture, religion and nationality.
WRI Fighting Fund
Three years ago we set up The Fighting Fund for Widows Rights with funds from the Swedish aid agency SIDA. The idea for this came from listening to the stories told by participants at the first international conference on Widows Rights which we organised in 2001. Although in many countries laws exist to protect widows from customary practices which deprive widows of access to land, property and a livelihood, it is usually very difficult for widows to get legal protection. Our partners identified the need to have resources to help widows challenge customary but often illegal practices as a priority.
We wanted to run a pilot scheme to enable widows in extreme hardship get access to legal protection against despoilment by their husband’s brothers. We thought that if lawyers, or para-legals, were able to meet with the husband’s immediate kin (his ‘brothers’), they could be made aware of a widow’s legal right to remain in the marital home and continue to work the land, or, if in an urban situation, to work out of the home or use it as a means of generating an income. Often a meeting organised at the village level with the kin group of both the deceased husband and the widow, and the notables of the village – caste elders, lineage elders, village chiefs, even paramount chief, would be enough to get the agreements needed to enable the widow to remain in the marital home and to retain much of the property the couple owned or worked. Expensive and protracted legal proceedings could be avoided, and at the same time these negotiating session allowed the visiting widow’s defenders to teach many of the influential people in a village of the rights of widows.
We asked our partners to keep careful notes of cases taken up – whether convincing kin at the village level not to take the widows’ property or actual court cases – so that we could post them on our website for others to learn from.
We also thought that we could use the cases taken up through the Fighting Fund for Widows Rights in in our advocacy activities both within the UK and in various United Nations fora. Our partners too might find the case materials useful in their own activities on behalf of widows, and lawyers in other regions fighting for widows’ rights in their countries might learn of helpful precedents.