Sandra Joireman
Growing up in rural Iowa, Sandra Joireman was surrounded by land, and she took notice early of the issues that come along with it. Joireman’s awareness and interest in the importance of land ownership in the farming community she called home has stuck with her throughout her academic career.
In college, Joireman became passionate about institutional change in developing countries and intrigued by the workings of the legal system.
It was in graduate school at the University of California, Los Angeles, that Joireman, a self-described “political scientist at heart,” was able to marry her interests. She began researching and completed her dissertation on property rights in Sub-Saharan Africa, and eventually wrote several books and articles on the subject, including most recently, Where There is No Government: Enforcing Property Rights in Common Law Africa.
She has continued studying this topic for the past two decades, spending time in Ghana, Uganda, Kenya, and Ethiopia. Her most recent project took her to Liberia and Kosovo, where she is examining post-conflict property rights and return migration. She received a Fulbright award to study Kosovo in 2012-13 and uncovered a sad truth about women’s property ownership in that country.
“Around 10 percent of all property in Kosovo is owned by women,” Joireman says. “That’s astoundingly low.”
When she started asking questions about why so few women owned property, she received answers similar to ones she was familiar with from her work in Africa — customary law and tradition.
Joireman found that Kosovo is adopting modern and egalitarian property laws in an effort to join the European Union. While legal protections for women exist, enforcement on the local level is lagging. She wondered if a lack of compliance with these laws presented barriers for women’s engagement in the economy — and possibly signaled challenges for Kosovo when addressing more significant and unresolved property issues.
Joiremen presented her research, "Securing Property Rights for Women (and Men) in Kosovo,” at a World Bank conference.
It caught the attention of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and Joireman was invited to be part of a project team that is now working to help transform property rights in Kosovo. She visited Kosovo in early December 2014 to conduct preliminary research. She is helping develop recommendations, which include making both legal and social changes, intended to eventually create institutional change related not only to women, but also property rights in general.
“Property rights are critical to development. Legal change is typically step one, but legal change along won’t equal transformation,” Joireman says. “I’m very excited to be a part of this long-term project.”