FAO - Land and Gender

To achieve the Sustainable Development Goals and promote gender-equitable land tenure, discriminatory laws, institutions, and customary practices need to be addressed. Women are typically more harshly impacted by land tenure insecurity due to discriminatory laws and lingering social bias. In many contexts, they lack direct, unmediated rights to the land and their access depends on their relation to male family members. They face layers of discrimination in both the law and in practice, fuelled by their gender, race, ethnicity, affiliation, orientation, age, or social status. The Global Agenda for Sustainable Development spotlights land as a critical driver, and regional efforts reflect growing political support for women’s land rights. Indicators contained within the FAO Gender and Land Rights Database inform about the number and gender of agricultural land holders and owners, its value and area in female hands. This way, the data indicates whether the national context and policy is favouring or hindering equal land distribution. Also, findings orientate several initiatives by FAO, spanning from knowledge generation, development of tools and sex disaggregated data, dissemination of information, multistakeholders dialogue promotion, capacity development and technical support to countries.

 

 

The Gender and Land Rights Database (GLRD) was launched by FAO in 2010 to highlight the major political, legal and cultural factors that influence the realisation of women’s land rights throughout the world. Agricultural censuses which indicators are based on are conducted every five or ten years, depending on national proceedings. Currently presented indicators cover periods between 1990 and 2012. 

The GLRD Country Profiles (link is external) are regularly updated to reflect the major legal and policy changes that affect men and women’s tenure rights. Also, the GLRD collaborates with the Statistics Division in FAO (link is external) as well as other partners including IFPRI (link is external) to generate more gender-disaggregated land tenure statistics.

 

 

The data mainly come from agricultural censuses, which are typically undertaken by National Statistical Offices and/or Ministries of Agriculture. Agricultural censuses are undertaken approximately every 10 years. Data from European countries are harvested from Eurostat and are also based on national agricultural censuses.

Since 1950, the FAO promotes the use of standard international concepts, definitions and methodology (link is external) for national agricultural censuses. The introduced terminology enhances the comparability of the results. However, the methodology applied varies from country to country. While some countries conduct a complete survey, others work with an enumeration of a large sample. There is no clear distinction between the results. Strongly recommended is a modular approach, which encourages institutions to complete a full enumeration covering basic information with extended questionnaires requested from a sample. Most efficiently, the agricultural census is coordinated with the population census. The recommended approach is lined up with the Global Strategy to Improve Agricultural and Rural Statistics (link is external), and the UN Guidelines on Population and Housing Censuses (link is external) and documented in the World Programme of the Census of Agriculture 2020 Volume I: Programme, concepts and definitions (link is external) und Volume 2: Operational Guidelines.

 

 

National Statistical Offices and/or Ministries of Agriculture and Eurostat as a provider of data harvested from European countries as well as other partners including IFPRI.