• upholding female property and inheritance rights helps mitigate negative economic consequences of AIDS experienced by women and their households
• upholding female property and inheritance rights can help prevent the spread of HIV by promoting women’s economic security and empowerment, thereby reducing their vulnerability to domestic violence, unsafe sex, and other AIDS-related risk factors
• discriminatory inheritance practices have negative consequences for AIDS-affected households: widows suffer partial or total loss of assets, including their land and homes, to relatives of the deceased spouse leaving such households destitute and more vulnerable to further consequences of HIV and AIDS

Guaranteeing women’s property and inheritance rights in the context of HIV and AIDS requires both global and country-level actions. Successful action should focus on five key areas:

• documenting women’s land and housing rights and tenure security in high HIV/AIDS prevalence areas
• raising public education and awareness, especially among national policy makers and donors
• reforming legislation, including customary law and practice
• identifying strategic litigation opportunities, especially improving legal skills, establishing legal precedents through test cases, improving the court system, and ensuring women’s access to legal structures and processes
• identifying and supporting experimentation within communities to change economic and institutional arrangements including initiatives that seek to support the collective ownership or lease rights to land and establishing land trusts for AIDS orphans

[adapted from author]