In October 2016, women farmers from 22 countries across Africa climbed the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro to claim women’s rights for access to and control over land and natural resources. This event coincided with the launch of a campaign of the African Land Policy Centre (ALPC) to reach the target of having 30 percent of all registered land in the name of women by 2025 and to embed women’s land rights into the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

The webinar on Women Inheriting Land: Rights and Realities took place on 22 February, 2019.

The objective of this webinar was to discuss the significance of owning land through inheritance, the challenges that prevent women from inheriting land, the opportunities offered through the best practices and the possible actions that can be taken at different levels.

This report provides a summary of the discussion.

Broad Areas of discussion:

Este estudio analiza la relacion existente entre la capacidad de agencia de las mujeres rurales que luchan por tierra y recursos productivos con los programas o las políticas orientadas a reducir la pobreza en las familias rurales en Nicaragua.

Date: 8 mars 2019

Source: Farmlandgrab, GRAIN

Date: mars 2019

Source: Foncier & Développement

Par: Kathleen Sexsmith (IISD)

This article discusses different issues pertaining gender and land governance with focus to access and control of land by rural women and how this affects their resilience in G5-Sahel region- Chad, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mali, and Mauritania. Findings show that land remains the property of men, customary chiefs, male members of the family who have the full control of land use; women continue to serve as servants of their husbands in the farming activities.

This study examines the effect of land rights on agricultural outcomes in Rwanda. We characterize the effects of land rights from two perspectives. The first one is land rights indicated by the right to sell and guarantee land and the second one is land titling. The agricultural outcomes include agricultural productivity, food security and nutritional diversity. From the results, land rights are found to have a positive relationship with all the outcome variables. The effect of land rights on agricultural productivity is larger if the household head is male.

Land and natural resource tenure security is a central yet often neglected area for economic development and poverty reduction in the developing world. Land is fundamental to the lives of poor rural people. It is a source of food, shelter, income and social identity. Secure access to land reduces vulnerability to hunger and poverty. There are some 1.3 billion extremely poor people in the world, struggling to survive on less than US$1.25 a day, and close to a billion continue to suffer from chronic under-nourishment.

Food insecurity has been a major global development concern. Hence, SDG Two seeks to achieve Zero Hunger by 2030. The situation is severe in sub-Saharan Africa, where customary practices deprive women of land ownership and limit their access rights. This paper explores the influences of a gendered land tenure system on food security in Nandom District, adapting conditional assessment modules defined by USDA and FAO. With a list of households categorized under headship, 30 respondents were proportionally selected from each of the four study communities.

Les femmes de la région de l’Extrême-Nord du Cameroun font face à un environnement sociologique qui limite leur accès au foncier : mariage, illettrisme et ignorance des dispositions règlementaires, complexité et coût des procédures de sécurisation foncière, facteurs financiers... Par ailleurs, l’accès des femmes au foncier est accompagné des perceptions locales à la fois positives et négatives, mais qui reste fortement influencées par la coutume et les règles traditionnelles.