By Philippine Sutz, Senior researcher – Legal Tools team; Natural Resources Group, International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED)
This blog was produced for the LEGEND Land Policy Bulletin. Land: Enhancing Governance for Economic Development (LEGEND) is a DFID programme that aims to improve land rights protection, knowledge and information, and the quality of private sector investment in DFID priority countries.
The International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) is leading a two-year project to identify and share lessons about women's empowerment in land-based investments in East and West Africa. Two events in these regions so far have brought together over 50 practitioners from across the continent to identify innovative practices.
IIED is working with Netright (Ghana), IED Afrique (Senegal), the Kenya Land Alliance (Kenya) and Tanzania Women Lawyers Association (Tanzania) to identify and share lessons from strategies that support women's empowerment in land-based investments across East and West Africa and promote new ways to link local innovations to national policy.
Two regional lesson-sharing events were organised in Senegal and Tanzania as part of this project, bringing together over 50 practitioners and researchers from across the continent. Participants shared their experiences and discussed new ways to promote gender-equitable land governance.
New approaches are emerging as to how to tackle the issues at hand. Participants from Mali shared their experience of facilitating grassroots-level dialogue to ‘renegotiate’ gender roles in decision-making about land at family and community levels. In each village, discussions were organised to involve three separate groups: women, men and young people. Careful facilitation ensured that the voices of each group were duly listened to and that fear or lack of confidence did not interfere with discussions. Ingrained customs do not change quickly and the discussion-based approach identified a number of risks that community members perceived in involving women in discussions around land, such as the threat to patriarchal values. However, they also identified benefits of involving women, notably, the added security that comes from more people knowing the details of individual land transactions and increased transparency the witnessing of transactions. This process led to the inclusion of women representatives in traditional land councils.
For more information see https://www.iied.org/pdfs/17310IIED.pdf or contact Philippine Sutz at Philippine.sutz@iied.org