Publication: Rural Women and Corporate Investment in African Land

Joint Oxfam and ActionAid paper prepared by Nidhi Tandon, Marc Wegerif and Catherine

Access it here:

http://landforafricanwomen.org/sites/default/files/docs/Rural%20Women%20and%20Corporate%20Investment%20in%20African%20Land.pdf

 

Publication: Environmental and Gender Impacts of Land Tenure Regularization in Africa: Pilot Evidence from Rwanda

Although increased global demand for land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few models to address these issues quickly and at the required scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of Rwanda’s nation-wide and relatively low-cost land tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.

A new working paper paper by the World Bank (Authors: Daniel Ayalew Ali, Klaus Deininger, and Markus Goldstein, August 2011) evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the approach using a geographic discontinuity design with spatial fixed effects. Three key findings emerge from the analysis.

• First, the program improved land access for legally married women (about 76 percent of married couples) and prompted better recordation of inheritance rights without gender bias.
• Second, the analysis finds a very large impact on investment and maintenance of soil conservation measures. This effect was particularly pronounced for female headed households, suggesting that this group had suffered from high levels of tenure insecurity, which the program managed to reduce.
• Third, land market activity declined, allowing rejection of the hypothesis that the program caused a wave of distress sales or widespread landlessness by vulnerable people. Implications for program design and policy are also discussed.

Access the working paper here.

Publication: Two Faces of Change: The Need for a Bi-Directional Approach to Improve Women’s Land Rights in Plural Legal Systems

Source: IDLO Enhancing legal empowerment through engagement with customary justice systems, Working Paper Series 

Summary: Includes the elusive path to development; land rights in plural legal systems – customary land law, law reform as a mechanism for change, current challenges in using formal law to promote change, country case studies in Mozambique and Tanzania; research-based conclusions, broader conclusions and recommendations.

Download the full paper (544K.pdf file) from the IDLO website at

http://www.idlo.int/Publications/WP2Mozambique.pdf

Publication: Governing Land for Women and Men. Gender and Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Land and other Natural Resources NEW

Source: FAO, Land Tenure Working Paper 19, (Elizabeth Daley and Clara Mi-young Park)
Summary: Summary: Includes gender, government of tenure and the Voluntary Guidelines; key analytical issues and themes; regional summary; conclusions for the Voluntary Guidelines.
Date: February 2011
Download the full paper (PDF 2.2MB) from the FAO website

Publication: Women, marriage and asset inheritance in Uganda

Using a unique dataset from Uganda, which collected individual-level asset ownership data and women’s life histories regarding assets, this paper examines the relationships between inheritance, marriage and asset ownership. Land is the most important asset in rural Uganda. The majority of couples (both married and those in consensual unions) report owning land jointly. Men who report owning a parcel of land are much more likely than women to say they inherited the land. Inheritance is not an important means of acquisition of other assets, including livestock, business assets, financial assets and consumer durables. These items are acquired through purchase, for both men and women.

Cheryl Doss, Mai Truong, Gorrettie Nabanoga, Justine Namaalwa

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Resource: Intl Land Coalition Land Portal Gender Page

Sharing gender and land information and interacting with people and organizations interested in this issue

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IFPRI Brief: the Gender Implications of Large Scale Land Deals

Whether viewed as “land grabs” or as agricultural investment for development, large-scale land deals by investors in developing countries are generating considerable attention. However, investors, policymakers, officials, and other key stakeholders have paid little attention to a dimension of these deals essential to truly understanding their impact: gender. It is easy to laud outside investment in agriculture, or to deride land deals and the accompanying processes as bad or unfair, without looking at the benefits and costs to local men and women. The results of land deals depend in part on the prior rights and responsibilities of women and men and in part on how the land deal’s implementation perpetuates, improves, or distorts these rights and responsibilities.

Access it here

Publications: ILC on Women and Land

Over the last three years, the International Land Coalition (ILC) has carried out a project entitled “Securing Women’s Access to Land: Linking Research and Action” in Eastern and Southern Africa with support from the International Development Research Centre (IDRC). The project aimed at learning from grassroots women and promoting a transformative agenda for women’s land rights and at its core, more than 20 partners in 7 countries undertook action-oriented research with the support of two partner institutions, the Makerere Institute for Social Research (MISR) in Uganda and the Institute of Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) in South Africa.

Crucial to this project was the idea that research processes and outputs are not ends in themselves, but used for advocacy, including locally with traditional authorities and nationally with policy-makers – and this advocacy is continuing beyond this project.

The project has generated reports for each action-oriented research project, synthesis reports and policy briefs, the first set of which are now available for download. More research reports and policy briefs will be uploaded in the coming weeks.

Publication: Débat sur l’accaparement des terres : et l’égalité entre hommes et femmes dans tout ça ?

Les transactions foncières à grande échelle menées par les investisseurs étrangers dans les pays en développement — aussi désignées sous le nom d’« accaparement des terres » — ont suscité une attention considérable ; cependant on n’a pas assez prêté attention aux spécificités de genre dans ces transactions. Une approche tenant compte de l’égalité des sexes est essentielle si l’on veut vraiment comprendre l’impact des transactions foncières. Les hommes et les femmes ont des opportunités, des rôles et des droits différents au sein de la société et sont affectés différemment par les changements sur les régimes fonciers liés aux transactions foncières à grande échelle. La logique derrière l’attention portée à la problématique hommes/femmes dans l’agriculture dérive d’un ensemble varié de preuves qui démontre la contribution cruciale des femmes, sous de nombreuses formes, à l’amélioration de la productivité agricole familiale, de la sécurité alimentaire et de la nutrition. Des témoignages indiquent que dans de nombreuses parties du monde les hommes et les femmes utilisent les ressources différemment : les femmes sont plus susceptibles de dépenser leurs revenus en nourriture, soins de santé et pour l’éducation de leurs enfants. La recherche empirique démontre aussi qu’augmenter les ressources contrôlées par les femmes revient à promouvoir une productivité agricole accrue. Les investissements fonciers encouragés au nom du ‘développement rural’ manqueront donc leurs objectifs, à moins de s’attacher tant aux besoins des femmes qu’à ceux des hommes.

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¿Dónde está el género en el debate sobre acaparamiento de tierras?

Las transacciones de tierras de gran escala por parte de inversionistas extranjeros en los países en desarrollo –también conocidas como “acaparamiento de tierras”—han generado considerable atención; sin embargo, se ha prestado poca atención a la dimensión de género de estas transacciones. Una perspectiva de género es crítica para realmente entender el impacto de las transacciones de tierras. Las mujeres y los hombres tienen roles sociales, derechos y oportunidades diferentes, y serán afectados de manera diferenciada por los cambios en los regímenes de tenencia asociados con las transacciones de tierras de gran escala. El razonamiento para prestar atención a los temas de género en agricultura deriva de un conjunto amplio de evidencia que demuestra las muchas maneras en que las mujeres son esenciales para las mejoras en la productividad agrícola familiar, la seguridad alimentaria y la nutrición. La evidencia indica que, en muchas partes del mundo, hombres y mujeres utilizan los recursos de manera diferente: es más probable que las mujeres gasten los ingresos que controlan en alimentos, atención de salud y educación de sus hijos. El trabajo empírico también muestra que aumentar los recursos controlados por las mujeres promoverá una mayor productividad agrícola. Las inversiones que se promueven en nombre del “desarrollo rural”, por lo tanto, no alcanzarán su objetivo si es que no atienden las necesidades de las mujeres así como de los hombres.

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