What are some of the factors that give rise to gender inequality in East Africa?
Mary Rusimbi: There are several. There have been quite a lot of efforts on more equal access to resources for both men and women in all three countries. Take land, there are a number of legal frameworks which say land in Tanzania belongs to both men and women. But when it comes to practice, customary law takes over – a process that prevents women in the villages from owning land. But when they do not have access to resources like land, women also cannot have access to banking and other services, because they don’t have collateral and so on and so forth. So that adds another level of inequality.
