This paper is a critical review of practices, policies, rules and laws that either enable or inhibit
women from accessing and owning properties in their private capacities with special reference to
Botswana. This is by no means an attempt to demean or under play the importance of exemplary
reforms undertaken by the Government of Botswana in the last twenty years. The aim is to
identify areas requiring further action lest we become complacent and degenerate into a ‘male
dominated and female subservient’ society that we are trying to leave behind. Furthermore the
importance of property ownership – especially ownership of land and houses - as tool for
empowerment women does not need to be emphasized. Land and housing are central to human
reproduction – an activity that has traditionally been pioneered by women. However, women
within sub-Saharan Africa have had only guaranteed access to land. Women’s rights to own land
and those houses have always been in some sort of a limbo. In Botswana, for example,
traditionally women owned the houses but not the land on which they were built. Women also
owned and controlled the expenditure crops and harvests but did not own the land on which the
crops were cultivated. The land belonged either to the husband, son or the father. Despite
numerous policy and legal reforms introduced by the post independence government, few women
have been able to own land in their personal and private capacities. This paper seeks to highlight
some of the factors that have perpetuated women’s exclusion from property ownership.