2023-06-20 12:39:01
International Widows Day 2023: national mobilization to facilitate access to inheritance
June 20, 2023
The institution of International Widows’ Day by the General Assembly of the United Nations on December 21, 2010, resulting from a plea undertaken by the First Lady of Gabon, Sylvia Bongo Ondimba, with the support of Gabonese diplomacy, has since 2011 to regularly highlight the specific challenges and issues facing surviving spouses.
As part of the 2023 edition, the Sylvia Bongo Ondimba Foundation, in partnership with the Ministry of Justice and the Gabon Equality intergovernmental initiative, particularly wished to raise awareness and challenge the difficulties related to the inheritance process.
On this occasion, the various partners organized between June 9 and 14 a series of workshops with the aim of highlighting the many legal, administrative and financial challenges that surviving spouses, families and heirs face when succession.
These meetings, bringing together the main actors in the succession process – in particular magistrates, court officers, State services – and ancillary systems such as banks and insurance companies, but also civil society and surviving spouses, have thus enabled to bring out recommendations addressed to the Gabonese government, delivered during a high-level event held on Monday June 19 at the Presidency of the Republic, in the presence of the Head of State Ali Bongo Ondimba, the First Lady Sylvia Bongo Ondimba and representatives of the Government and the main corporations.
“We have to fulfill a duty of vigilance and reparation towards these widows and widowers, towards these orphans and orphans, who continue to send me many messages, who keep alerting me to the difficulties encountered again and again on the course of succession. In this week which celebrates the 13th edition of the International Widows’ Day, I really want us to find lasting solutions, so that once and for all, we put an end to these excesses..” said Sylvia Bongo Ondimba with emotion during her speech.
The Sylvia Bongo Ondimba Foundation for the family also wanted this week of June 19 to be an opportunity to raise awareness around the inheritance process to explain the rights and the steps to be taken with the provision of numerous educational tools around the theme ” Recognition of inheritance rights: how does it work? ”.
Thus, June 23, International Widows’ Day, will be an opportunity to welcome surviving spouses and orphans to support them in their legal procedures through the deployment of an open day organized by the Management of the cell of listening to the Widow and the Orphan at the Benoit Messani social complex located in Batavéa in the 3rd arrondissement of Libreville.
A centralized point where the surviving spouse and the orphan will have the opportunity to find all the necessary resources to manage the estate in a simplified and coherent way thanks to personalized assistance, specialized legal advice and access to essential information concerning rights, procedures and steps to follow.
To know more
Link to the Solidarity Widows page: initiatives/initiatives-for-women/solidarit%C3%A9-widows
Link to the press kit: internationale-des-veuves-2023-le-dossier-de-presse.
Link to the leaflet: succession-course-of-the-surviving-spouse-and-of-the-orphan.
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