Improving women’s ability to securely access land is recognized as an effective means to increase gender equality and advance other key social and economic development goals. Despite progressive laws in many African countries, gender disparities commonly persist in women’s access and ownership of land. Although legal empowerment of women can help to strengthen their claims to land, governments commonly lack the capacity to offer legal services.

This annual progress report highlights key achievements and lessons learned of the “Grassroots Capacity Building for REDD+” project in the Asia‐Pacific region in 2013.

Rwanda has provided a picture of promising change for improving gender equalities in land rights. This report draws upon extensive qualitative field research in 20 sectors of Rwanda to examine the current state of gendered rights to land in practice. Among Rwandan communities, there is now widespread knowledge of laws granting gender-equal rights. More and more women are receiving inheritance and inter-vivos gifts and are increasingly receiving these in equal shares, while formally married women are exercising greater decision-making power over land held jointly with their husbands.

Em 2009, o Centro Terra Viva (CTV) publicou o Guião de Consultas Comunitárias, como parte do seu esforço em melhorar a aplicação da legislação sobre terras e outros recursos naturais. O guião resultou de várias pesquisas de campo realizadas pelo CTV e outras organizações que trabalham na área de Terras.

March 2014 – Inheritance is the overwhelming way land is acquired in India, but societal practices exclude women from inheriting land. The Hindu Succession (Amendment) Act 2005, an inheritance law that covers 83.6% of the population of India, corrected some fundamental inequalities in the law bringing the women in equal status to men in the right to inherit land. However, eight years after its enactment, the ground reality is that women still do not inherit land on an equal basis with men.

Gendered relations in resource access and farming are two important intersecting themes of gender studies in a northern rural context. However, conventional analysis and perceptions of the economy conceal the contribution of women within families, in businesses and in the labor market. This article demonstrate the significance of capital to farming women’s engagement with agriculture using a Swedish case study, based on descriptive analyses of data from the Federation of Swedish Farmers.

There are gender-differentiated impacts when land is harnessed for commercial investment. Land policy needs to address the gendered nature of power relations within families and land tenure systems, and the implications of rural social relations on processes of community consultation, land management and dispute settlement. Without this, land investment policies will not reach their goals of tenure security for all, agricultural productivity and increased revenue.

The Government extension services in Papua New Guinea (PNG) are weak. There is a general lack of money and staff, and the country has a poor infrastructure. Above all small-scale farmers in remote areas are left out of developments. This applies in particular to women farmers, despite their providing 85 per cent of the rural workforce.

Publicly elected women representatives in India ought to take advantage of their influence to defend women’s rights.

To ensure that there is sustainability at the community level in its land rights and governance training programme, Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (HAKIARDHI), a Tanzanian national level organization that spearheads land rights of small-scale producers, uses land rights monitors (LRMs) in its program areas. In each of the selected villages of the program districts, two LRMs (a man and a woman) who have received land rights training from HAKIARDHI are democratically elected by villagers.

March 2014 –  This paper discusses a pragmatic, adaptive framework for understanding and taking action to strengthen women’s land tenure security in the context of customary tenure. The Framework defines secure land rights in terms of five elements, which each serves as the basis for distinct, measurable indicators upon which to base project assessment, design, and evaluation. This paper presents the Framework and suggests its potential as an analytical foundation for assessing the security of land rights, for designing projects or developing policies that protect and stren

March 2014 – This paper critically examines how lease farming can be a viable livelihood option for landless rural poor, especially women in India. In the absence of land ownership and education, the majority of landless and semi-landless rural women are engaged as low wage agricultural labourers and remain trapped in poverty and indebtedness. Lease farming by landless women in Kerala and Andhra Pradesh shows a pathway for reducing their poverty and enabling upward social mobility.