This month marks women’s month and now, more than ever, women and men alike are coming together in abundant numbers, encouraging and rallying for the strength of women everywhere.  We took a few moments to sit down with but a few of the inspiring women who attended the Arab Land Conference from the 26-28 of February in Dubai. Scroll down to hear their inspiring thoughts.

Momentum is building behind a land rights revolution. Last year, just prior to the World Bank’s Annual Land and Poverty Conference, I wrote about the many factors pushing land to the top of the global agenda.  To maintain this momentum we must pay greater attention to gender and women’s land rights.

Over the last 10 years, a clear consensus has emerged: investments in land should be done responsibly. However, understanding tenure-related risk in the context of land-based agricultural investments in emerging markets can be complex.

For individual women and men within communities, these complexities can have severe and negative effects on their land and livelihoods. This is especially true for more vulnerable members of the community: widowed or divorced women, youth, and ethnic minorities.

“How can “property” own property?” It means how can a woman own property like land or housing if she is considered as a man’s property herself. I learned of this “phrase” from Tanzanian colleagues during a global team workshop in Oxford, UK, last autumn with the WOLTS project. They shared with me about how women in Tanzania are sometimes viewed by men as belonging to them – as their property! Something I thought was quite different to Mongolia.

WOLTS stands for Women’s Land Tenure Security.

Liberia in the 1990s was a place of turmoil, host to a brutal civil war that would kill at least 250,000 people and leave many thousands more displaced.

The war uprooted Martha* from her farm in Lofa County. Her husband, Joseph, was a rebel fighter aligned with one of the factions vying for control, and had taken her and the couple’s four children away from the family’s land, to a city closer to the rebels’ base.

On the day in 1996 that he was killed, Martha felt her own life slipping away.

It would be an understatement to say that the first Arab Land Conference was a busy one.  The afternoon of the conference’s last day, however, featured the Land Portal’s very own masterclass on Women, Social media and Their Access to Land in the Arab World.  Never has women’s use of social media been more pertinent.  In the past year alone, we have seen the rise of the #metoo movement, spearheaded by and for women globally, as well as Saudi women taking their rightful place on social networks, with the explosion of various famous hashtags including #women2drive, #Idrivemyself, #sto

There is broad global agreement that secure property rights help eradicate poverty and that securing women’s land rights reduces gender inequality. But our understanding remains strikingly limited when it comes to the extent to which women’s land rights are – or are not – secure and the impact of women’s tenure security (or lack thereof) on women’s empowerment.

This is true even in Africa, where the most studies have been published, due to shortcomings in both the quality and quantity of research on these questions.

In the effort to address global sustainability challenges affecting people, prosperity, and planet, in 2015, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the global community to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). SDGs have recognized women’s land rights as opposed to its predecessor, MDGs. Of over 230 indicators, three are on women’s land rights and seven are generally on land rights.

By Tim Hanstad, Co-Founder & Senior Advisor, Landesa

This is the second blog in a series of two that are based on a keynote address made at the 2018 India Land Development Conference.

2018 could be transformative for the indigenous and community land rights movement, with unprecedented opportunities for scaling up rights recognition around the world.

By Professor Jeffrey Sachs, Chairman of the Advisory Board of CCSI, University Professor at Columbia University, and Director of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network

In February of this year, a deportation officer of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was indicted for extorting immigrants for cash and sexual favors. Arnaldo Echevarria promised two undocumented women “working papers” in exchange for sex, eventually impregnating one of them.

This is just one example of the many cases of sextortion that vulnerable women, and sometimes men, face around the world.