This study was commissioned to review the current land tenure systems in selected countries in southern Africa, to identify constraints and opportunities relating to tenure security and improvements in women’s land rights and to recommend strategies to alleviate problems.

Aid in Support of Gender Equality and Women's Empowerment (pdf, 1.5MB) published in March 2011, presents statistics on aid from DAC members to sectors focused on gender equality and women’s empowerment for the period 2008-2009.

The Global Donor Platform OECD focal point, Karim Hussein, points out that page 5 of this new publication reviews agriculture and rural development and interestingly showed that only 5% of DAC donor aid for agricultural inputs had a gender equality focus.

• The SOFA Report 2011: “Women in agriculture: Closing the gender gap for development” (User:Wikigender, 15:02, 17 March 2011)

Agriculture is central to food security and global economic growth.

The Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW) is the only international treaty specifically focused on preventing discrimination against women and explicitly dealing with rural women and their rights (Art. 14). On 18 December 1979, the Convention was adopted by the United Nations General Assembly. It entered into force as an international treaty on 3 September 1981 after the twentieth country had ratified it.

The Global Gathering of Women Pastoralists, held from 21-26 November 2010 in Mera (Gujarat), India, brought together over 100 women from herding communities scattered across 32 different countries to discuss the myriad problems faced by nomadic and semi-nomadic women pastoralists worldwide, and how, united, they can strive to solve them.

This lesson brief explores the struggles women face in benefiting from their customary rights. It is part of the Uganda module on the Focus on Africa: Land Tenure and Property Rights online educational tool.

The recent Constitutional Court judgment rendering the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) unconstitutional (Tongoane and Others v Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs and Others) must not be allowed to throw decentralisation policy making into disarray. Decentralisation holds much potential for lively, participatory democratic law making and enforcement, through which rural women can gain greater power and secure more rights. 

Last 25-26 October 2010, the Association for Land Reform and Rural Development (ALRD), the Asian NGO Coalition for Agrarian Reform and Rural Development (ANGOC) and the International Land Coalition (ILC) jointly organised this Regional Workshop on Women and Land Rights, as a response to the urgent need to cast the spotlight on women and their access to and ownership of land. The objectives of the workshop were identifying strategic areas and developing a road map for 2011-2012, to strengthen ILC Asia’s work on women’s land rights.

Strengthening women's inheritance and property rights can be an effective means of decreasing poverty and increasing gender equality, and thereby accelerating progress towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This paper presents two case studies from Rwanda and Ethiopia to illustrate the potential impact that advocacy, legislative reform and law enforcement in this area can have on the achievement of the MDGs in developing countries.

This paper - from the International Food Policy Research Institute - strives to introduce a discussion of the gender dimensions into the growing debate on large-scale land deals.

When reading about women in pastoral societies it is common to find reference to their marginalised roles, their hardship, their oppression and their lack of power as opposed to men’s domination, men’s ownership, men’s power and associated patriarchal relations.