The renovation process in Vietnam in the past decade has enabled significant economic growth as well as and greater rights and more important economic roles of farming households. However, much of this reform has focussed on men as head of households, meaning men have benefited more from economic reform, both economically and in terms of their power within the household. Inequalities continue in access to and control of key resources such as land, water, credit and rest time, as well as in access to public services.

The IGTN Advocacy Document for the 5th WTO Ministerial Meeting that was held in Cancun, Mexico in September 2003 focuses on these four issues and identifies critical advocacy positions for each of them. With regard to agriculture, the IGTN asserts that control over agriculture by states rather than the WTO would ensure that small-scale and subsistence farmers have control over farming and food supply; a particularly important concern for women around the world who are those responsible for ensuring household food security and managing family farms.

Contains background, policy responses (PRSP, LSSP, national gender policy), legal responses (Constitution, co-ownership, Land Bill 1997 and Matembe Clause, Land Act 1998 and Consent Clause, Land Amendment Bill 2003), challenges, way forward, annexes.

This publication comes out of the Gender, Citizenship and Governance programme of the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), Netherlands. The project aimed to develop good practice in changing governance institutions to promote gender equality, enhance citizen participation and build accountability of public administration systems. Action research projects were conducted with 16 women's organisations and non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in eight countries in Southern Africa and South Asia (South Africa, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, and Bangladesh).

Examines some contemporary policy discourses on land tenure reform in sub-Saharan Africa and their implications for women’s interests in land. Demonstrates an emerging consensus among a range of influential policy institutions (including the World Bank, IIED and Oxfam GB), lawyers and academics about the potential of so-called customary systems of land tenure to meet the needs of all land users and claimants. African women lawyers are much more equivocal about trusting the customary, preferring to look to the State for laws to protect women’s interests.

This document is the culmination of a year-long exercise of a community-led process for ground truthing the violations of environmental conditions laid out in the Coastal Regulation Zone approval for a large infrastructure, coal handling and port facility in the Mundra region of Kutch district in the western Indian state of Gujarat. It presents compelling data on the nature of the violations, many of which were anticipated when local community members objected to the Waterfront Development Project (WFDP) of the Adani group in the region.

Egypt's Personal Status Law (PSL) coalition, made up of activists, lawyers, government officials, NGO leaders, legislators, and scholars, has been lobbying for 15 years for changes to the personal status laws that govern marriage, divorce, child custody, and inheritance. These efforts resulted in the passage in January 2000, of ?The Law on Reorganization of Certain Terms and Procedures of Litigation in Personal Status Matters? (Law No.1, 2000).

How have Egyptian feminists promoted women's rights? This paper looks at the Egyptian Feminist Union (EFU) in the fight for women's right to vote in Egypt in the early twentieth century. The EFU had much in common with the international women's movement then mobilising around women's right to vote. The IWSA represented the basis for an 'international sisterhood', where the EFU's goals were in line with other feminist organisations that came together under the IWSA.

Women do 70 per cent of the agricultural work in Senegal, but according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), own only two percent of the land that may be cultivated. Although property laws in countries such as Senegal, Tunisia and Burkina Faso recognise women' s and men's equal rights, and Islam gives women the right to inherit half what men inherit, in practice men retain land ownership. Women are dependent on fathers or husbands for land.

Gives a brief overview on how the gender debate featured in the process of land reform in Tanzania and asks why socio-economic arguments have to be used by advocates of gender equitable land rights. Focuses on the Uluguru mountains and shows that the need for registration is rather a consequence of its possibility and not of deficiencies of tenure security within the customary system, and that informal access to land can be experienced as more secure than formal registration. Further argues that demand to use land as collateral is low and risk-awareness especially among women high.

El Reglamento general de la Ley de Desarrollo Agrario, publicado en el Libro I del Texto Unificado de la Legislación Secundaria del Ministerio de Agricultura y Ganadería, tiene or finalidad la aplicación de la Ley que propenderá al beneficio y desarrollo de campesinos, indígenas, montubios, afroecuatorianos, agricultores en general y empresarios agrícolas.

How does the World Trade Organization's (WTO) Agreement on Agriculture (AOA) affect the livelihoods of rural women in Asia? This paper, prepared on the occasion of the WTO-AOA review in 2003, analyzes the impact of the new trading rules imposed by the WTO on Asian peasants. It illustrates the inherent imbalances in the WTO-AOA's trade liberalisation policies which, among other things, flood local markets with highly subsidized agricultural imports from developed countries to the detriment of domestic agriculture.