Strengthening women's access to land

General

Several studies have shown that Niger is one of the countries where poverty has a female face and one of the explanatory factors isthe difficulty of women to access land in a secure way. However, 50.6% of Niger's population is made up of women and girlsand is still the majority in rural areas. . In this environment, which contains more than 80% of the population, women are a real workforce for agriculture and livestock farming. They account for more than 80% of agricultural activities, from sowing to processing and marketing. They derive their income mainly from these agricultural activities and small businesses. As a result, they occupy an importantplace in all links in household food and nutrition security. Despite this numerical weight and their full involvement in agricultural activities, this layer uses only 6% of exploitable land and rarely owns it. The land issue is an important issue for rural women because land conditions their production activities. In the department of Tanout, women are major producers of market garden products and okra. They exploit marginal lands (flooded or glacis) in the form of loans, pledges or leases. The land expropriations that occurred since 2008 in the communes of Bakin Birgi and Ouallalewa have considerably increased the difficulties of women's access to agricultural land already diminished by the continuous degradation linked to the effects of climate change. On the other hand, women are generally marginalized in sharing family land inheritance. They are used as labor that helps their family and / or their family in field work that they do not control harvests. Many projects and programs in these areas have often faced situations where the women they support in agricultural activities find it difficult to find or keep sites for a long time. Indeed, women's access to these sites is usually done by loan, pledge or even donation. Most of these acquisitions are not secure; therefore subject to enormous difficulties in time. The present project aims to carry out a broad advocacy so that the situation of women's access to land is improvedand secured in the communes of Bakin Birgi and Ouallaléwa. The innovation of this project lies in the proposal of a combination of actions led by women leaders focused on improving access to land and land tenure for the benefit of women in rural areas.