Empowering Women to Claim their Inheritance Rights: Post-Project Impact Analysis

Publication Date: 01/07/2021

Between January 2013 to June 2016, CARE International Egypt implemented a project addressing “Empowering women to claim Inheritance Rights (WIN)”. This project was funded by the European Commission under the Gender Equality Programme and aimed to strengthen the access of women particularly those in Upper Egypt to gain access and control over their economic rights, resources and opportunities through their lawful inheritance.

The objectives of this impact evaluation was to:
1. Quantify the Impact achieved as the result of the Amended Inheritance Law in terms of people whose rights to a life free from (economic) violence is being fulfilled to a greater degree than before the amended Inheritance law.
2. Assess and analyse if/how the introduction of criminalization and penalties in the Inheritance Law have enhanced the application of the amended Inheritance Law to date and provide recommendations on how its application can be further improved/strengthened.
3. Identify and analyse non intended effects both positive or negative, of the Amended Inheritance Law with regards to women property rights through inheritance.

Extrapolating the model to the published data on vital statistics, agricultural statistics and income expenditure published by the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics of 2016 through 2019 reveals that the application of the new amendment of the law potentially results in nearly 34,000 more women who can have access to their inheritance annually.

Based on feedback from women’s’ activists interviewed, the effect of COVID-19 and the closure of courts on the number of women affected was believed to be negligible. Many of these cases are extremely complex and usually take many years in courts and hence would not be significantly affected by this delay.

As inferred from the feedback of key informants, it is too early to to identify positive impacts of the law amendment, however, they highlighted some threats that might hinder the achievement of the desired impact of the law amendment.
- The long duration of the legal dispute and associated legal costs
- Procedural pitfalls
- Socio cultural barriers

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