What I learned about land rights from people who don't work in land rights

Desde una comunidad en el corazón de la crisis climática, la lideresa guaraní Mariela Melgar Ibáñez cree que las mujeres indígenas tienen la clave para resolver la crisis climática. “El mundo debe conocer nuestras formas de vida y el rol que tenemos dentro de el cuidado del medio ambiente; Las mujeres somos fundamentales, luchamos por el territorio.”

By Peter Sangeyon, Gender and Land Champion, WOLTS Project Tanzania

From 1995 to 2005 I was the village chairman, and I was a ward councillor for ten years after that. I was very pleased when the community selected me to be a WOLTS gender and land champion.

Chad is at the verge of an emerging land tenure crisis. As observed in many countries in Africa, formal and customary tenure systems overlap. Customary tenure systems, that generally prevail in rural areas, differ from region to region, with each its own needs and practices. Land conflicts are abundant, caused by degradation and transformation of land surfaces caused by climate change, as well as land investments by domestic investors with disputed legitimacy.

By Milya Samberu, Gender and Land Champion, WOLTS  Project Tanzania

By Tuya, Gender and  Land Champion, WOLTS Project Mongolia

Many rural communities in Tanzania share similar challenges from mining companies and investors. I have seen first-hand how men and women gender and land champions can help.

Just like many African countries, a majority of Zambian tribes follow a matrilineal system, that is, an affinity system in which descent is derived through maternal instead of paternal lines which essentially means children are recognised by the names or family of their mothers. This does not only affect decent but also involves the inheritance of titles and property including land through the female line. One might ask why women have less access and control of land in Zambia when land and property is inherited through maternal lines.

There is an underlying tension in the land rights movement that is rarely addressed head on, which is the perception that securing women’s land rights threatens community land rights. Community land rights are typically held by indigenous people, small-scale and subsistence farmers, pastoralists, herders and many other groups who are directly dependent on land for their livelihoods but whose land tenure is often the most precarious.

The main objective of the LAND-at-scale program is to directly strengthen essential land governance components for men, women and youth that have the potential to contribute to structural, just, sustainable and inclusive change at scale. An ambitious objective, that cannot be achieved in isolation. Alignment is, therefore, a key factor in all LAND-at-scale activities - be it at project level for our country interventions or through our collaborative approach to knowledge management.

By: Thais Bessa, gender advisor at Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG). 

Purnima Kora is an ambitious farmer. She owns two small parcels of land that she purchased with her husband’s support and years of savings she earned from farming PepsiCo potatoes and rice, as well as by leveraging micro loans through a women’s self-help group. She also leases another half-acre plot to farm potatoes.