Housing and sustainable development: Reflection on urban women's rights to real property in Eastern Nigeria

Housing problems among women in eastern parts of Nigeria seem to be cumulative effects of long term placement of women in disadvantaged positions. For instance, female children were not encouraged to have formal education and could not inherit landed properties. They were made to accept that the society did not expect them to own houses; this is because any man living in his wife’s house was seen as living on dunghills.

This present study aims at examining changes that have occurred to some of the cultural beliefs and practices; and the effects of these on the state of house ownership of women in the region. This is with a view to recommending programmes that will ameliorate, specifically, women’s housing problems and other problems arising from unequal access to societal resources in general. The study will attempt an adoption of both quantitative and qualitative techniques to obtain data on a target sample of 200 women drawn from two of the states in the region.