[From Youtube.com] In September 2010, in Nairobi, Kenya, IDRC hosted the policy symposium, Gendered Terrain: Women's Rights and Access to Land in Africa. At this symposium, researchers from across Africa shared their findings and engaged with policymakers. These 11 short videos present valuable insight from some of the symposium's participants.

Few days after an important report from the Center on Housing Rights and Evicitions (COHRE) on women's land and housing rights in Phnom Penh, another report on forced evictions in Cambodia, this time from Amnesty International and focused on rural areas. This publication tells the stories of five cambodian women who have faced or resist forced eviction from their homes and land.

[From CIFOR] This article explores the effects that gender composition of forest user groups has on property rights and forestry governance, based on data from 290 forest user groups in Kenya, Uganda, Bolivia, and Mexico. Findings indicate gender composition of user groups is important, but not always in the expected ways.

We the Rural Women’s Assembly of Southern Africa, meeting in Durban on the event of the 17th Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC in Durban from 30 November to 5 December 2011 demand that governments take the following immediate steps to address the clear and present danger posed to rural communities by the climate crisis.

An article on women's land rights by Mu Sochua - Cambodian MP and former Minister for Women's Affairs - on the Cambodia Daily (January 10th 2012)

The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is an intergovernmental body and functional commission of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) mandated to promote gender equality and the advancement of women. The fifty-sixth session of the CSW, which takes place at the UN Headquarters in New York from 27 February to 9 March 2012, will focus on the theme “The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges”.

The  Beijing Platform for Action, an agenda for women's empowerment, spelled out a set of objectives and actions to be taken by governments, the international community, non-governmental organisations and the private sector to overcome obstacles to women's equality. Amongt the critical areas of concern relevant to women's land rights mentioned in the document are the following:

This page is meant to provide a quick overview of major reference to women's land rights in existing international instruments, as well as paragraphs related to women  - or more broadly gender - in the First Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the context of National Food Security (VGs). The VGs are still under-negotiations under the auspices of the Committee of World Food Security, and are therefore still subject to change.

Judy Adoko, Executive Director at the Land and Equity Movement (LEMU, Uganda) sent us a set of documents as a contribution for the on-line discussion "How can women's land rights be secured?".

This paper on agroecology and women's empowerment in Brazil includes a long section on "The Right to Land and Natural Resources in Brazil"  from a feminist perspective. It is published by the Association of Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). The summary of this article follows. 

I am sharing this extremely important report from Margaret Sekaggya, the Special Rapporteur of the situation of human rights defenders (2011). In 2007 the former Special Rapporteur, Hina Jilani, affirmed that “the second most vulnerable group when it comes to danger of being killed because of their activities in the defence of human rights, are defenders working on land rights and natural resources” (Hina Jilani, 2007, Report submitted to the Human Rights Council, A/HRC/4/37).