The brief illustrates two communities’ efforts through collective action to secure property rights over their land. As conflict over natural resources and the need for sufficient farm land continue to increase, both men’s and women’s groups tried to negotiate their rights to manage natural resources to maintain their livelihoods. The groups also tried various governmental schemes and other approaches to secure their rights over land.

This paper will first explain briefly why gendered relations around property rights are an important development and welfare issue. Then it will explore what has happened to women’s rights under agrarian reforms, titling and registration programmes, and land privatization programmes in general. The paper will then briefly describe how women have attempted to respond to threats on their rights. The final section will explore the relation between property rights and access to factor markets, a crucial relation in agricultural production for the market.

This Backgrounder is the first in a multi-authored series on Cultivating Gender Justice. In this series, we seek to uncover the structural foundations of sexism in the food system and highlight the ways people, communities, organizations, and social movements are dismantling the attitudes, institutions, and structures that hold patriarchy in place. To end hunger and malnutrition, we must end injustices in the food and agriculture system.

Interventions aimed at increasing water availability for livelihood and domestic activities have great potential to improve various determinants of undernutrition, such as the quantity and diversity of foods consumed within the household, income generation, and women’s empowerment. However, current evidence on the topic is diluted across many different publications. This paper aims to connect the dots and review the literature available on the linkages between irrigation and food security, improved nutrition, and health.

A sample survey of 648 households was conducted in 54 villages in the humid forest zone of Cameroon to understand the effect of the economic crisis (dating from 1986) and the 1994 currency devaluation on the practices of small farmers, and the effect of these practices on forest cover change. Four hypotheses were tested concerning: the balance between plantation crop and food crop production; the degree of market-orientation of food crop production; the gender division of labour; and the degree of dependence on non-timber forest products (NTFPs).

The brief describes development planning consultations, locally known as musrenbang, conducted in stages through different levels of governance: village, sub-district and district. The brief then documents lessons from experience catalyzing collective action among local community goups (in particular women’s groups) to engage in this development process and to help articulate the women’s aspirations in such a way that they could be heard by district decision makers.

This brief article documents author's reasons for considering the answer to be "yes." She draws first on her extensive ethnographic experience in forest communities in the US and in several forested areas of Indonesia, with examples. Her second source of conviction in this view comes from her involvement in a comparative study of criteria and indicators in Africa, Asia and South America, in which she visited many forested areas around the world.

This report presents grassroots women’s approaches to access justice with focus on land and property rights in Africa. This community empowerment-based research undertaken by the Huairou Commission and its partner groups across seven African countries – Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – showcases women’s rights challenges and effective strategies to improve women’s access to justice.

In most cases, the establishment of protected areas (PAs) goes hand-in-hand with an increase in conservation costs to communities living adjacent to these PAs. This paper draws insights from gender theories in particular feminist political ecology approach to unravel the impact of PAs on men and women around the Kilimanjaro National Park (NP) and the Enduimet Wildlife Management Area (WMA) in Tanzania. Specifically, it investigates how the creation and expansion of two PAs in Tanzania have impacted men and women in different ways.

Con el fin de visibilizar la situación de las mujeres rurales en la región del Chaco argentino en torno a sus derechos y acceso a la tierra ante la Convención Internacional sobre la Eliminación de todas las formas de Discriminación contra la Mujer (CEDAW) de Naciones Unidas, diversas organizaciones de la sociedad civil trabajaron articuladamente en la elaboración de un informe alternativo que fue presentado en la sesión 65ª de la CEDAW en el 2016.

Kenya is the most recent African state to acknowledge customary tenure as producing lawful property rights, not merely rights of occupation and use on government or public lands. This paper researches this new legal environment. This promises land security for 6 to 10 million Kenyans, most of who are members of pastoral or other poorer rural communities. Analysis is prefaced with substantial background on legal trends continentally, but the focus is on Kenya’s Community Land Act, 2016, as the framework through which customary holdings are to be identified and registered.