Combining both written analysis and video interviews;this ‘longreaddetails the impacts on women’s lives of three approaches developed by IIED partners in Tanzania;Ghana and Senegal to reinforce land governance structure in rural communities to make them gender-inclusive.

This research investigates threats to women’s land rights and explores the effectiveness of land certification interventions using evidence from the Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) program in Ethiopia. The research aims to provide evidence on the extent that LIFT contributed to women’s tenure security. Quantitative information was analyzed from the profiles of more than seven million parcels to understand how the program had incorporated gender interests into the Second Level Land Certification (SLLC) process.

It is likely that rural women will disproportionately bear the socio-economic hardships from COVID-19. Restrictions on the movement of people and goods are disrupting agricultural value chains and food systems. Women have weaker land tenure security and less access to productive resources than men. As markets close and cross-border trade declines;women suffer from not being able to sell their produce;and from lacking access to inputs needed for the next planting season. Lockdowns result in increased domestic and care work for women.

A nine-minute video. Most rural people in Uganda have rights to their rural land through customary tenure arrangements;representing 75-80% of land holdings: but only 15-20% of the land is formally registered. Often women;especially widows;experience land grabbing;arbitrary eviction and poor access to justice. GLTN and others are working to help vulnerable smallholder farmers in South Western and Elgon regions through the implementation of a ‘Securing Land Tenure for Improved Food Security in select areas in Ugandaproject. The video illustrates some of this work.

A recent study of two Senegalese villages showed how training women on land access is helping them claim their land rights. But disparities in results between locations and the use of customary practices as the preferred way of accessing land highlighted that civil society organisationsstrategies and approaches need to reflect local realities and ensure women from different groups and geographies also benefit.

Land and labour rights can intersect in multiple ways. Investments in large-scale plantations often entail trade-offs between job creation and compressions of land rights. Also, labour relations can involve tenure dimensions, for example where estate managers sublet plots for workers to complement wages with food production for their family or local markets.

Empowerment is the “expansion of people’s ability to make strategic life choices”. According to the UN, women’s empowerment has five components: women’s sense of self-worth; their right to have and to determine choices; their right to have access to opportunities and resources; their right to have the power to control their own lives, both within and outside the home; and their ability to influence the direction of social change to create a more just social and economic order, nationally and internationally.

"Participatory law-making” is the process by which citizens actively contribute to policy advocacy and law-drafting. Citizen participation in law-making can improve the quality and legitimacy of policies and laws by ensuring that they reflect and protect the authentic interests of the national citizenry. In the field of land rights, participatory law-making can help ensure the recognition and protection of legitimate tenure rights.

The crucial event in the reporting period was undoubtedly Armenia’s war with Azerbaijan. On September 27, 2020 Azerbaijan started its war on Nagorno-Karabakh, a long-disputed region called Artsakh in Armenia, which lasted for 44 days. It ended on November 10, 2020, when Russia facilitated a cease-fire, apparently just after the Azerbaijani forces had captured most of the territories occupied by Armenia in the previous war in the early 1990s, plus a major chunk of Nagorno-Karabakh proper.

Gender equality is key to eliminating poverty and hunger, and this has been demonstrated by FAO throughout its research across the world. FAO is committed to interventions that seek to reduce gender inequalities and this report has been produced as part of its eff orts to generate evidence and knowledge in compliance with FAO’s Policy on Gender Equality (FAO, 2013a). It is only through closing the gender gap that strategies on sustainable agriculture and rural development can reach their full potential.

Gender statistics play a key role in mainstreaming gender into policies of the state and serves as a tool to adequately assess and reflect the situation of women and men in economic, social and political spheres of the society. Gender statistics allows increasing public awareness about the status of women in relation to that of men and conducting systematic study of gender issues.