Dar es Salaam. Good morning! The Chanzo is here with a rundown of major news stories reported in Tanzania on May 27,2024.

New land policy set to safeguard women’s inheritance rights

The Minister of Land, Housing, and Human Settlements Development, Jerry Slaa, announced that the country is set to unveil a new land policy, which is a review of the existing policy, but currently designed to address the issue of women being deprived of their inheritance rights under the guise of preserving customs and traditions.

Slaa explained: “The Land Policy of 1995 recognized women’s rights, particularly in inheritance. However, it also stated that customs and traditions would be considered in its implementation. This provision is often exploited to deny widows their inheritance.”

“The review of the Land Policy in 2023 aims to safeguard the interests and rights of women who are deprived of inheritance under the pretext of customs and traditions. It is evident that our societal conditions have evolved,” emphasized Slaa.

According to the 2023 human rights report by the Legal and Human Rights Centre (LHRC), there were 15 documented cases of widows being evicted from their properties in the sampled research of the report.

 The LHRC highlighted that, “the denial of inheritance and property rights is mostly fueled by discriminatory customs and traditions.”

Tanzania achieves modest growth of 4.6% in Q4 of 2023, driven by the service sector

Tanzania achieved modest economic growth in the last quarter of 2023, reaching 4.6 percent. The Quarterly Gross Domestic Product (QGDP) at current prices increased to TZS 51.2 trillion.

Key sectors driving this growth include financial and insurance services (17.7 percent), information and communication (11.6 percent), electricity (8.2 percent), professional, scientific, and technical services (8.0 percent), and administrative support services (7.9 percent). Most of these rapidly growing sectors are service-oriented and employ a relatively small portion of the population.

In contrast, sectors that employ a larger number of people, such as agriculture, construction, trade, and repair, recorded more modest growth. Agriculture experienced a growth of 3.8 percent, up from 2.4 percent the previous year. Trade and repair stagnated at 2.6 percent, while construction showed a slight increase from 2.6 percent to 2.7 percent.

Comparison with other neighbors in the region this is a much lower growth; Rwanda had attained a growth of 10 percent while Uganda has attained a growth of 5.5 percent.

Lack of detailed reporting hampers efforts to address femicide in Tanzania

Violence against women encompasses a wide array of harmful acts, ranging from verbal harassment and emotional abuse to severe physical and sexual assault. At its most extreme, this violence manifests as femicide: the intentional murder of women because they are women. Despite its alarming prevalence, our understanding of femicide remains limited, largely due to inadequate data collection and reporting.

Femicide is typically understood as the misogynistic killing of women by men, often by intimate partners such as current or former husbands, boyfriends, or same-sex partners. However, broader definitions include any killings of women or girls. Femicide differs from male homicide in significant ways; it often involves ongoing domestic abuse, threats, intimidation, and sexual violence, highlighting the power imbalances between perpetrators and victims.

Accurate documentation of femicide is challenging. In many countries, police and medical records do not specify the relationship between victim and perpetrator, nor do they always indicate whether gender-related motives were involved. This lack of detailed reporting hampers efforts to fully understand and address the issue.

Read the full analysis here

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