This scoping study on women's access to land in East Africa sets up a conceptual framework in which to consider issues of women's land tenure and identifies key aras for future research as well as key actiors toward increased jender equity in land rights.

This report is part of a broader comparative effort by the Overseas Development Institute’s Humanitarian Policy Group on Land Tenure in Conflict and Post-Conflict Situations, which aims to inform and improve the policy and practice of humanitarian action and to inform related areas of international policy. It seeks to understand how land issues affect and are affected by violence and conflict resolution, what responses are appropriate and what lessons can be learned from specific contexts of land tenure interventions, both during and after conflict.

This background briefing reports on a study of land access for returnees in Rwanda, and the impacts of land access policies in the post-conflict period. It also seeks to understand better the roles international humanitarian agencies and NGOs have played, and how their performance can be improved. It is not suggested that Rwanda is typical, but rather that the centrality of land issues there has thrown up a revealing set of broader questions.

The briefing ends with the following lessons;

[via UN-HABITAT] Women’s equal rights to adequate housing, land and property are well elaborated under international human rights law but are often elusive in practice. This document is a reference guide to international human rights standards identifying both the substance of women’s rights as well as the commitments made by States with regard to improving women’s rights to adequate housing, land and property.

[via FAO] This report is based on the proceedings of the Technical Consultation on Gender, Property Rights and Livelihoods in the Era of AIDS, organized by FAO in November 2008. It takes stock of where FAO and its partners are in terms of addressing property rights insecurity and provides a proposed framework through which future action can take place.

A Guidebook on Women Human Rights Defenders is aimed to help women human rights defenders name the specific risks, violations and constraints they face in their work.  It presents a practical discussion of the useful mechanisms developed by the state and also the civil society to provide redress and remedy, and to protect women human rights defenders.  It is intended to be used by human rights and other organisations to further a gender perspective in the monitoring and documentation of human rights. 

This book explores the meanings of gender justice and the practice of citizenship as shaped by context-specific histories, cultures and struggles. It presents a conceptual framework and provides four regional perspectives and a guideline for development programs. The section on Sub-Saharan Africa in particular focuses on the the definition of citizenship in the female experience as more than simply a formal relationship between the individual and the State, but also involving her position in a family, a community and an ethnic group.

[From the BRIDGE website] This Overview Report explains what is meant by gender-sensitive indicators and measurements of change; makes the case for gender-sensitive measurements; and outlines how to go about measuring in practice. It includes sections that focus on measuring the impact of gender mainstreaming and on assessing specific areas of gender inequality - such as gender-based violence or the gender dimensions of poverty. A range of international measurement instruments are discussed, including widely recognised goals and indices, as well as innovative new approaches.

[From the BRIDGE website] Gender-sensitive measurements are critical for building the case for taking gender (in)equality seriously, for enabling better planning and actions by gender and non-gender specialists, and for holding institutions accountable to their commitments on gender equality. Yet measurement techniques and data remain limited and poorly utilised, making it difficult to know if efforts are on-track to achieve gender equality goals and commitments.

The present Poverty Reduction Strategy and Action Plan (PRSAP) 2007 provides the framework for poverty focused planning and budgeting in the short to medium term. Poverty reduction will be central to all sectoral development plans and the medium term expenditure framework. Part 3 defines the Overarching Policy Objective as follows: The overriding goal of the PRSAP is to reduce poverty by more than 50% by 2015 and then ultimately eradicate it by 2022.

This paper analyzes how women’s participation affects institutional outcomes related to the decentralized governance of community forests in Madhya Pradesh, India. The analysis is based on data from a representative sample of 641 cases of joint forest management, India’s flagship program to involve communities in forest governance. We focus on two outcomes relevant for local livelihoods: control of illicit grazing and control of illicit felling in the forest.

In Rwanda, two factors make land a highly important and contested issue. First,
Rwanda has the highest person-to-land ratio in Africa. This creates tremendous
pressure on land in a country where most of the population lives in rural areas, and
where agriculture remains the central economic activity. Second, Rwanda is recovering
from massive population shifts caused by decades of ethnic strife and the 1994 civil war
and genocide, which resulted in displaced populations and overlapping land claims.