Burkina Faso

The landlocked, Sahelian country of Burkina Faso, with a population of 15.8 million, is one of the most densely populated countries in West Africa and one of the poorest in the world. A 2009 United Nations Human Development Report places Burkina Faso 177th of 182 countries ranked. The major religions are Islam, indigenous beliefs, and Christianity (approximately 50 percent, 40 percent, and 10 percent, respectively). Burkina Faso's accession to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women came into effect in 1987. Since then, much of the country's national legislation has been harmonized with that of the convention and other international agreements relating to the rights of women, and a wide range of legal instruments and bodies have been implemented to improve the position of women, including the Individual and Family Code and the Ministry for the Advancement of Women. The former espouses the principle of non-discrimination and equal rights for men and women.

However, positive changes in the institutional and legislative arena regarding the promotion and protection of women's rights has generally not been followed by a similar positive change in popular attitudes. Particularly in rural areas, there is a large gap between legislation and the day-to-day lives of women in Burkina Faso. Most women are not aware of their rights, and the largely patriarchal dictates of traditional societies are the accepted morality for both men and women. For example, in matters of inheritance, although Burkinabe law stipulates that the surviving spouse is the absolute heir, in reality the widow's inheritance right is usually ignored by the deceased husband's relatives, who may refuse to grant her legal custody of the children and access to the estate.

Although overall literacy rates are very low in Burkina Faso, women's disadvantaged status in society is further reflected in the extremely high rate of illiteracy among women (only 12.5 percent of adult women are literate compared with 29.4 percent of men) and in the perpetuation of many traditional practices harmful to women's health and well-being. These include underage and forced marriage, levirate (the practice whereby a widow is obliged to marry a relative of her deceased husband), tolerance of domestic violence, and female genital surgery (FGS), a traditional practice involving the alteration or removal of the external female genitalia. Despite the 1996 ban on FGS and the establishment of a national committee to address the practice, the rate of FGS in Burkina Faso still stands at 73 percent.

Women's participation in public life and access to the labor market is hampered by the difficulties they face in gaining access to land, credit, and basic social services. Although there are a number of women's associations working with the support of the state and development partners to develop income-generating activities for women (e.g., petty commerce and livestock farming), socioeconomic and cultural factors continue to result in a restriction of opportunities for Burkinabe women.