Many people mistake dowry and bride price as same but they are different.
In some countries like India, dowry is when the family of the wife-to-be pay certain amount of money or give property to the family of the husband-to-be as insurance for their daughter to be taken care of.
In countries like Nigeria, dowry are usually the assortments/property or gifts offered to the bride by her own family for her to carry to her husband’s house as her entitlements.
They include pots, mortar, mattress, freezer, wheelbarrow, washing machine etc depending on the financial capacity of her family.
Any day she decides to leave the marriage or her husband dissolves the marriage, she must go back with those items because they belong to her.
Even the court have held that a woman has the right to demand that she wants to take those dowry items back to her father’s house after divorce.
Bride price, on the other hand, is when the family of the husband-to-be pay certain amount of money to the family of the wife-to-be to officially seal the marriage. This is practiced in Nigeria.
Bride price is the money you pay customarily (depending on the tribe) to the parents of the wife-to-be such as ₦200, ₦500, ₦1000, ₦30,000 etc. This is because they are not selling their daughter.
As a parent, it’s important you have receipts of the items you gave your daughter as dowry and take pictures of the items on the day you present them to her.
This is important because there are instances where the husbands claim those items during divorce, thereby denying the women access to the dowry when she is leaving.
With the pictures of the items or receipts, her husband cannot later claim he bought those items and she will be able to claim them back.
If he refuses her from taking them, she can take legal actions to recover them.
But note, you can only claim the ones that are still existing as at the time of the separation and not the ones that have been lost or destr0yed during the marriage.
In summary, a woman’s family provides the dowry while the man’s family provide the bride price.
