“In this part of the country, land is life,” says a young Ugandan woman. “Good dreams are about your land.” But widows and orphans are often denied access to their own land because of “property grabbing.”

As Jesse Rudy, the International Justice Mission Director in Uganda explains, property grabbing occurs when a man dies in Uganda and his relatives force the widow and her children off of their land, claiming it as ancestral “family land” disowning the widow from the man’s family.

International Justice Mission (IJM) is working to ensure that private property laws in Uganda are upheld and enforced. With the assistance of IJM, more than 650 widows and orphans have been able to recover their land.

As Kristie Eshelman says, “The work of IJM in Uganda is more example of how important well-enforced private property rights are to human prosperity – and how much we take them for granted in our own society.”

(Via: Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics)