Impact of an intervention by the Rwanda Initiative for Sustainable Development (RISD) in contributing to the implementation of pro-poor and equitable land policies. Through evidence-based awareness raising efforts, dialogue, advocacy and networking, RISD was able to influence policy implementation and promote the land rights of poor and vulnerable groups, including women. 

Includes introduction: a new rush for land; framing the issues: historical and development questions; impacts of land grabs on rural women; concluding notes; proposed pointers for action.

Baseline survey which includes a literature review. Findings cover land and livelihoods, land ownership and security of tenure, land rights and decision making, land market and transactions, land disputes. Concludes that the volume of land transactions is too low to support a transformation from subsistence to commercial agriculture, as planned. Smallholder farmers have limited capital options making increased land utilization impossible. Tenure security for women is still far from a reality. There is a need to strengthen land rights of widows and orphans.

Analyses the World Bank’s Policy Research Report (PRR) from a gender perspective and is critical of the consultation process on it thus far. It has important implications for women in Africa. The Bank believes land should be viewed not as a source of subsistence but of capital. It ignores women’s unpaid labour as a factor in agricultural productivity. It treats the household as an undifferentiated unit and ignores that the family often functions as a site of oppression. The Bank stresses ‘motivated’ family labour but ignores that much of women’s labour is far from voluntary.

Contains executive summary; food insecurity and the AIDS epidemic; barriers to women’s farming; women’s land rights; economic and social empowerment; violence against women; inheritance rights and property grabbing; politics, ideologies and vested interests; recommendations.

Includes women’s land rights and tenure security in a context of legal pluralism and land tenure privatization; competing legal systems and land rights protection on the ground � what is going wrong? Argues that in a context of increasing land scarcity, high population pressure and progressing land tenure privatization, men are increasingly taking advantage of their superior position within the patrilineal tenure system, advancing their own interests at the expense of weaker family members, first and foremost the women in the family.

Includes inheritance: a key way women access land; local mechanisms: ‘custom’, power dynamics and lack of engagement; formal justice system: community pariah status and systemic barriers. The lack of access to land cannot be framed as a failing of formal or informal systems, but rather as issues with both. The key to increasing access to justice at both formal and informal levels is to address power dynamics and understand how they operate to the detriment of women.

Contains women’s rights and state-led agrarian and market based land reforms; reinstating the state; engendering customary tenure; rights of indigenous people and marginalised groups; human rights violations; HIV/AIDS; the ‘feminisation of agriculture’. Calls for a new agrarian reform agenda in which the state plays a central role, ensuring that land is established as a common public good, and that its benefits are enjoyed equitably by women and men, regardless of race, class or ethnicity.

Short summary of a Ph.D. thesis. The dominance of the white farm issue has delayed serious attention to more subtle land conflicts. Thesis focuses on the continued maintenance of communal land rights by urban property owners. Explores what would happen if these rights disappeared. In reality and in the absence of explicit state policy, poor families and women are already relinquishing these rights, which has very practical implications for urbanisation.

Includes official land rights in Kenya; refusing inheritance – widows and daughters in the patrilineage, dispute trajectories; institutionalizing women’s exclusion – local control boards, local dispute tribunals, formal courts; shifting the debate; working with constructive values in this context. The problem needs to be tackled using the avenues that currently promote the marginalization of women; the socio-cultural value systems that determine which behaviour, arguments, and actions are legitimate in a community.

The Guiding Principles are designed to help a number of stakeholders develop larger-scale agricultural investments that are more likely to prove sustainable, beneficial, and successful for communities, investors and governments.

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.