How can the abstract principles of the human rights-based approach (HRBA) be translated into practical strategies to improve women's ownership and access to land? In Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, despite changes in national law and policy aiming to improve women's land tenure, none of the land reforms meet human rights standards. This is because legal regulation of land blurs with customary laws mostly relating to land transactions and family, marriage or inheritance.

The Women Advancement Trust (WAT) in Tanzania carries out various initiatives related to land rights, affordable housing, and inheritance rights. This report presents lessons learned from a housing and shelter development initiative. The goals of the initiative were to empower low-income communities, particularly women, to participate fully and actively in all aspects of human settlements development, including the improvement of their living and housing conditions.

Land distribution and access to land are key issues in Zimbabwe. In recent years, nearly all of the country's commercial farm land has been re-designated, leaving most farm workers dislocated from their farm villages. The government of Zimbabwe argues that the land reform programme is needed to achieve historical and social justice. However, this article concludes that the government is engaged in serious human rights violations and is appropriating land to distribute to its followers for political not social justice ends.

This study attempts to analyse changing patterns of land transfer and ownership, as well as school investments by gender over three generations in customary land areas of Ghana's Western Region. Traditional inheritance rules deny land ownership rights to women. Yet the increase in the demand for women's labour due to the expansion of labour intensive cocoa cultivation has created incentives for husbands to give their wives and children land. Through this and other gift mechanisms, women have increasingly acquired land, thereby reducing the gender gap in land ownership.

While the majority of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and particularly Eastern Africa provide a living for their families on land, they largely do not own it. This comprises one part of a study on women and land in five countries in Eastern Africa - and was commissioned by the Eastern African Sub-Regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI).

Indigenous land tenure arrangements in South Africa have generally consisted of communal ownership. In this system, who benefited from the land depended on their status as family or clan head. The colonial regime dispossessed Africans of land in favour of European arrivals, or defined family property as ancestral property in which the senior males of the head family were taken as the owners with the rights to inherit. The post-apartheid government conceptualised acess to land for the previously disadvantaged as a human right.

Women's access to land is a fundamental factor in food security. Yet women all over the world suffer under discriminatory property and inheritance laws and customary practices which restrict their rights over the land on which they live and work. Articles 15 and 16 of CEDAW state the rights of women to property and inheritance. This report is a tool to help non-governmental organisations and multilateral agencies in advocacy and policy dialogue using CEDAW and the Optional Protocol (which allows individuals and groups to make complaints directly to the CEDAW committee).

This study aims to identify how women's capacity to become more involved in decision-making at the local level can be strengthened, particularly in terms of access to natural resources. It also aims to identify the structures through which women secure their systems of production. It focuses on the situation in Niger, where women are increasingly excluded from dominant systems of production: in agricultural areas, they are increasingly excluded from agricultural production and in pastoralist areas, they have lost their herds and had to resort to agriculture.

The Integrated Drylands Development Programme (IDDP) is a global UNDP initiative to promote sustainable development in the drylands, and advance the implementation of the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. This topic brief highlights the important role that gender plays in this context of sustainable development, in particular the role of women in the Arab States and Africa. In these regions, inequality and stereotypical gender norms often prevent women from contributing to the sustainable development of drylands, despite possessing a wealth of traditional knowledge and skills.

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.

The research provides a holistic overview of the key changes that affected Northern Chin society from pre-colonial times up to now in villages close to Hakha town where State penetration was stronger than in more remote

areas. The study sheds light on the overlapping and evolving statutory and customary land systems and on the issues faced by contemporary Chin communities as they seek to govern land and natural resources.

In the light of the global discussion on

reducing public and private expenditure on

cadastral processes and services, this

article reviews the transaction costs of

land registration, based on data gathered in

Namibia. The data show a large

differentiation in the types of costs

incurred in the process, as well as various

levels of cost recovery. In addition, the

degree to which delays in the operational

registration processes influence the total

cost to land developers and landowners is

reviewed.