family, Peninah Atieno Owitti, a residence of Nyakach and her husband Pius Odongo opted to include their daughter as well as their sons in their will.

Peninah Atieno.
“My husband and I wrote a will in January this year—as you never know how tomorrow will be. I have witnessed what other women go through when it comes to land and inheritance and didn’t want them to go through the same,” she explains.
This decision was met with a lot of opposition from her husband’s family who still believe that a woman has no say or has no right to inherit any property in her father’s land.
Double standards
“They said that our daughters will one day get married and have access to their husbands’ properties, hence they didn’t deserve inheriting our land. They said I was wasting resources, but I stood firm in my decision. Why is it that we love our daughters when they assist in taking care of us or when we request them for money, but we can’t acknowledge that they are our children just like our sons and have a right to our property? This is my property and I choose how I want it distributed,” she narrates?
Born in Siaya, the mother of five comes from a polygamous family and recalls of the struggles and fights they faced in matters concerning land when their father passed away in 1999.
“Members of the family fought and grabbed his land leaving us with a small portion of land. When we later on grew up and got jobs, we each opted to buy land away from our ancestral land and leave the small portion to our uncle,” she recalls.
Peninah also discovered that her husband’s family had the same issue of land conflict.
“My husband’s family didn’t know the space and value of a woman. My in-laws told me that women don’t come to this land with anything, so what was there for us to claim? But tactfully, I have managed to change that attitude,” she says.
Despite the fact that the Law of Succession Act outlines equal inheritance rights for women and men, girls and boys, it is still upheld that wives and daughters have no right to inherit family property. For instance, while unmarried daughters still have the right to use the land within the paternal homestead in most cultures, in some they can only plant annual crops and are not permitted to either plant permanent crops or build permanent structures. Hence whenever a father opts to allocate land to unmarried or divorced daughters, the women face eviction from their brothers who believe that women have no right to inherit property.

Lucy Maina, a sociologist
According to Lucy Maina, a sociologist, there are many factors that have attributed to this change of mind by many families. First of all, modernisation and the fact that many more women are being educated and understanding what their right is in the family. The various nongovernmental organisations and women rights organisations have also played a part in fighting for women to be treated as equals and also be seen as children in the same manner as the boy child.