Lesotho's Legal Capacity of Married Persons Act (2006) — Abolishing Marital Power Over Women's Property

Before 2006, married Basotho women held the legal status of minors for their husband's lifetime: they could not sign contracts, register land, sue or be sued, or act as company directors without spousal consent. The Legal Capacity of Married Persons Act 9 of 2006 (LCMPA), championed by Lesotho's Ministry of Gender, abolished this 'marital power' for all marriage regimes.
A 2022 World Bank Policy Research Working Paper (Deininger and Ali) analysed Lesotho's full land registry (1981-2019) together with satellite imagery covering roughly 40,000 grid cells, finding newly registered plots were 55 percentage points more likely to list a woman as individual or joint owner after reform-linked land programmes took effect; from 2011-2019, women appeared as joint or sole owners on over 80% of leases from sporadic registration and over 85% from systematic regularisation.
The Millennium Challenge Corporation, which funded complementary land-registration and legal-literacy work, reports the reform's economic effect concentrated in urban areas; most rural women, still married under customary law, saw comparatively little change — a caveat future gender-budgeting or rural-outreach efforts would need to address.

Read the full analysis: https://www.mcc.gov/resources/doc/evalbrief-042222-lso-land-reform/