Rights to land for women have been enshrined in law in Zimbabwe, but the practice of law in reality often has not delivered women’s empowerment and rights. This must change, but how?
Puri, Odisha: On April 28, a friend and I went to Gola and Gopinathpur villages in Odisha to meet activists who, in the early 1990s, had been successful in stalling Tata’s proposed integrated shrimp farm project. As we were leaving, we learnt about an attack on a group of women land rights activists, six of whom had sustained grievous injuries.
Tina Anyango (not her real name) aged 28 is a widow living in Kuoyo Kaila, East seme Ward in Kisumu County. She is living with HIV which robbed her off the man she had lived with and loved for the past eight years. Her husband’s death left her solely responsible for their two children. To meet their needs, she depended on a one-acre piece of land she and her husband used to do farming together.
ELENERAI, Kenya (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Norah Chepkulul, a single mother of two young sons, stands outside her home, a grass thatched hut surrounded by cactus-like euphoria trees on the dusty Maasai Mara road in Kenya's Rift Valley.
She has just finished milking her four cows and has asked the boys to keep an eye on the goats corralled in the little compound.
Dr (Mrs) Ladi Shambo is the MD of Dijmeds Ventures Limited, a company that is into food processing and Shea butter processing.
After her retirement from the civil service, she decided to start producing spices.
“I produce ginger powder, garlic powder, chili pepper and mixed spice (‘yaji’) and ‘garin danwake’. These products have NAFDAC number and are in the market.
NYASHANA, Tanzania (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - As Tanzanian widow Ruth Zacharia raised her right arm to protect her skull from a volley of machete blows, her three attackers sliced through her hand.
She fell to the floor; one leg slid into the kitchen fire.
"They said: 'We have been sent by our mother because you killed our father so that you could buy that land'," the 63-year-old recalled, fidgeting with her stiff, scarred right hand.
Ghana has made a strong case at the United Nations for the economic empowerment of women in the cocoa industry.
At an event on the sidelines of the on-going 61st Session of the Commission on Status of Women (CSW) at the UN Headquarters in New York, it became clear that gender inequalities limit economic productivity, efficiency and undermines the development agenda.
To celebrate International Women’s Day, Mokoro is pleased to share news of the successful completion of fieldwork in the fourth of six phases of our WOLTS pilot study in both Mongolia and Tanzania. WOLTS is a major multi-country strategic action-oriented research project in support of the land rights of women and vulnerable groups. The WOLTS team is well underway with preparing two major reports of our country research findings, to be launched, respectively, in May and June this year.
Empowerment of rural women is fundamental for achieving 2030 Agenda
FAO/IFAD/WFP Joint News Release
8 March 2017, Rome - Leaders from the three UN Rome-based agencies today marked International Women's Day by reinforcing their commitments to step up efforts to invest in the capacities of rural women as key agents of change in building a world without hunger.
While development programming is increasingly politically savvy, and women and girls are high on the agenda, it’s bizarre how often gender is overlooked as one of the key determinants of who gets what in the world.
A facet of this problem arises from the nature of the land tenure system in the country over the decades.
As we celebrate the International Women’s day today, emphasis should be put to the extent to which some of the obligations have been achieved with regard to women’s basic needs including shelter, access to land and land security etc. The state of shelter development in Uganda shows that, with the bulk of its urban population in informal settlements, there is lack of security of tenure.
