This report is the fruit of collaboration between ILC, IFAD and FAO. It provides information on the historical background of the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of All Forms of Discrimination against Women and its Optional Protocol, the working methods of the Committee, reservations, as well as a summary of information provided in reports of selected countries.
The heart of the report is dedicated to "Land issues as reflected in reports to the committee on the elimination of discrimination against women", including legislation on access to land, ownership and inheritance rights, statistics on rural women, and institutional mechanisms for gender equality in rural areas.
Annexes can be particularly useful as they present information on more than 40 countries on legislation pertaining to access to land, property, inheritance and legal capacity (Table 3) and on reference to rural women in the concluding observation of the committee on the elimination of discrimination against women (Table 2).
You can download the publication from the website of the International Land Coalition or below.
In 2010, the ILC Secretariat decided to update information contained in the 2004 publication, so as to have a new basis to work more closely with and through CEDAW at national level. The update gives more visibility to the CEDAW Committee’s Concluding Observations and, accordingly, also to the CSOs’ shadow reports feeding them. This inclusion offers a more critical and comprehensive, if preliminary, overview of the situation of rural women in selected countries.
Additional resources:
Civil society organisations (CSOs) can engage significantly with CEDAW through “shadow reporting”. To facilitate such reporting, the International Land Coalition has produced an Infonote and Q&A on how to use CEDAW as an advocacy tool, providing basic information on how to access the CEDAW Committee and encouraging country-level alliances for monitoring.
