Source: Women, Business and the Law 2024 database.
Note: Sub-Saharan Africa includes 48 countries, of which Eastern and Southern Africa includes 26 countries.
Tanzania could do better when it comes to laws on women’s entrepreneurship and assets ownership
“You need money to make money.”
— Ms. Jane Magigita, Executive Director, Equality for Growth, Tanzania
The country is only half-way there when it comes to women’s entrepreneurship and assets ownership. In Tanzania, women’s ability to start businesses is limited due to lack of access to formal finance. The absence of legal prohibition of discrimination in access to credit based on gender provides a leeway for creditors to limit women’s access to loans diminishing their role in the overall private sector development.
The latest Afro Barometer study reported unequal inheritance rights as the second most important women’s rights issue in Tanzania, mostly fueled by the discriminatory customary law and practices which deny women’s and girls’ opportunities to inherit property, especially land. On both these matters, entrepreneurship and inheritance, the Government of Tanzania could leverage the experiences from reform efforts of its regional peers, including Kenya, Rwanda, South Africa, Uganda, and Zambia, to remove the outstanding barriers to enable women to accumulate wealth and invest. Notably, the government has shown commitment through a standalone World Bank funded project on women’s economic empowerment. The Project for Advancing Gender Equality (PAMOJA) aims to increase access to (i) economic opportunities for women and (ii) Gender-Based Violence prevention and response services, in targeted areas of the United Republic of Tanzania.
The legal framework is weakest when it comes to ensuring women’ safety.
Violence against women is a pressing concern in the country. Tanzanian Network of Legal Aid Providers (TANLAP) emphasizes gender-based violence as one of the most important gender equality issue. Nearly 50% of respondents in Afro Barometer study reported gender-based violence as the most important issue for women. Tanzania has no laws on domestic violence. Child marriage remains a wide-spread concern in the country limiting girl’s agency, education, and economic opportunities. The Law of Marriage Act 1971 allows girls aged 14 or 15 years to marry with parental consent, contrary to the Maputo Protocol.
“You cannot empower women without taking care of their children first.”
— Honorable Doctor Dorothy Gwajima, Minister of Community Development, Gender, Women and Special Groups, Tanzania
The 2024 Eastern Africa Regional Early Childhood Conference in Dar es Salaam also made it evident that the enabling environment for childcare services across the region and in Tanzania remains a blank page on public finance commitments and quality standards. In fact, according to the newly introduced childcare indicator, Tanzania has put in place only about a fourth of the minimum needed childcare legal frameworks. Closing legal gaps on childcare on average could lead to about 1 percentage point increase in women’s labor force participation, with this effect doubling five years after the enactment of the law.
Tanzania has less than a fourth of the policy frameworks measured by Women, Business and the Law for effective implementation of laws.
While the law is the first necessary step towards creating the enabling environment, even more needs to be done to ensure its meaningful implementation. In Tanzania, the gap between the laws and the frameworks supporting their implementation, as measured by Women, Business and the Law 2.0 for the first time, is the largest for the indicators with the perfect legal scores of 100 – Pay and Marriage (figure 2).
The Pay supportive frameworks score of 0 indicates an urgent need for the government’s investment in pay transparency measures and the statistical data on women’s sectoral employment to avoid discriminatory pay practices. Similarly, the establishment of the minimum set of policy instruments, including fast-track procedures, specialized family courts and legal aid, could facilitate quick resolution of family disputes by addressing issues that women face, including domestic violence, child custody, divorce, and property rights. Some regional peers, including Kenya, Uganda, and South Africa, have already instated some of these practices bringing their WBL 2.0 supportive frameworks score to 66.7.
Figure 2: The implementation gap is the highest in pay and marriage indicators
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