deprivation that often includes being married as a child, being deprived of education opportunities, abusive marriages, and other violence. The effects of discrimination based on gender and other statuses accumulate across the life course. When confronted with yet another status upon which they might be discriminated—their marital status of widowhood—older widows face even more heightened vulnerability. Despite these abuses, the rights and needs of widows are not mentioned in some of the most important policy-setting documents on women, poverty, and development. The Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action did not mention widows, nor did the Millennium Development Goals, or their replacements, the Sustainable Development Goals. Important development donors, such as the United Kingdom’s Department for International Development (DFID), do not reference widows in their gender policies, as is the case with the World Health Organization’s Global Strategy and Action Plan on Ageing and Health. The United States Agency for International Development, another development donor, merely references widows’ property rights in its gender policy, and the 2002 UN Madrid International Plan of Action on Ageing notes widows’ risk of poverty and widowhood rites. These are scant references when compared to the scope of challenges widows face. Zimbabwean law provides for relatively equal property and inheritance rights for men and women. However, many of the women Human Rights Watch interviewed struggled to claim those rights for reasons unique to their status as widows. In Zimbabwe’s recent history, men traditionally owned all family property, and when women were widowed, they were often “inherited” as wives by male relatives of their deceased spouse. In Zimbabwe today, wife inheritance is no longer the norm and property can be held by both men and women. However, few women formally own the property held in their marriage. As a result, their ability to keep the property they shared with their husband upon the death of their husband becomes dependent both on proving their marriage, which can pose great challenges, and on warding off in-laws intent on property grabbing. There are three types of marriage in Zimbabwe: the civil marriage (monogamous, registered marriage recognized by the state, commonly referred to as a “5.11 Marriage”), the customary law marriage (under which a man may have more than one wife but is registered), and the 3 HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH | JANUARY 2017