Women's legal empowerment: lessons learned from community-based activities

In 2010 and 2011, the International Land Coalition (ILC) supported five community-based projects promoting the legal empowerment of rural women. Projects piloted innovative ways to enhance women’s land rights, but also identified models for replication and scaling up. Activities included raising women’s legal awareness through grassroots mobilisation, community trainings, and consultations and the provision of paralegal services, with the aim of improving women’s ability to use legal and administrative processes and structures to gain or maintain land rights and to benefit from them.

ILC also facilitated a peer-to-peer exchange in India between SARRA and SWADHINA and a field visit and workshop in Cambodia, where lessons learned were shared with other ILC members from Asia and with Cambodian civil society organisations (CSOs) working on women’s land rights and legal empowerment. This briefing note captures lessons learned from these five projects and from the learning exchanges.

The briefing note is available in English, French and Spanish.

For more information on ILC’s work on women’s legal empowerment and detailed project briefs, please visit this page. If you would like further information on the ILC Women’s Land Rights Initiative and on the collaborating partners, please feel free to contact the International Land Coalition.