Land Tenure and Gender : Approaches and Challenges for Strengthening Rural Women's Land Rights

Land tenure security is crucial for
women's empowerment and a prerequisite for building
secure and resilient communities. Tenure is affected by many
and often contradictory sets of rules, laws, customs,
traditions, and perceptions. For most rural women, land
tenure is complicated, with access and ownership often
layered with barriers present in their daily realities:
discriminatory social dynamics and strata, unresponsive
legal systems, lack of economic opportunities, and lack of
voice in decision making. Yet most policy reform, land
management, and development programs disregard these
realities in their interventions, which ultimately increases
land tenure insecurity for rural women. This paper seeks to
further develop the evidence base for access to and control
over land.