This paper was prepared for presentation at the “2015 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty” in Washington DC last March 23-27, 2015 by Violeta P. Corral of the National Confederation of Small Farmers and Fishers Organizations (PAKISAMA), Philippines.

The Gender Evaluation Criteria (GEC) project was jointly implemented by PAKISAMA and Asian Farmers Association (AFA), support by the International Land Coalition (ILC).

Unequal and insecure access to land undermind women's farm productivity, limit employment options, depress their earnings, and degrade the environment. Factors limiting women's access to land include legal discrimination, land scarcity, inappropriate government policies, and lack of political power and social status. Policies to promote sustainalbe development rather than focusing on family planning, as is commonly done, should directly support women's economic activities.

In Africa, land has an emotional and mystical value beyond the economic consideration and
represents the social security and the continuity and independence of a family. In much of rural
Africa, land constitutes the primary source from which millions of people derive their daily
livelihoods (Bhandari 2001)
1
. In sub-Saharan Africa, women contribute between 60-80% of labor
used to produce food for both household consumption and sale to agricultural production while
women’s access to and control over land in Africa remains minimal (FAO, 1998).

To accompany the training video (available here) produced by USAID-funded programs GREEN Mekong and USAID LEAF Asia, a discussion guide is now available for trainers and grassroots facilitators to delve deeper into the gender aspect of social equity in terms of forest-based climate change initiatives, including REDD+. The questions in the guide will help facilitate discussions concerning forest management practices and forest governance in the local and institutional contexts.

This South African Agricultural Public Expenditure Review (AgPer) is one of a series of similar studies undertaken in several countries in Sub-Saharan Africa under the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Program (CAADP) of the African Union’s (AU) New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) which encourages governments and development partners (DPs) to target public expenditure on the agriculture sector as the most effective way of stimulating growth.

As organizations working on food security, natural resources management and poverty eradication, we strongly encourage governments to keep the profile of land and natural resources high in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Agenda document to be endorsed in September 2015. Secure and equitable land rights are an essential element of an Agenda that has the ambition to be people-centred and planet-sensitive.

Women for Women International has worked with over 84,000 marginalised women in the east of the Democratic Republic of Congo and commissioned research to explore these women’s land rights. The study found that the women could not own land, even through inheritance, while men controlled the sales of the items that their wives farmed.

Urban open spaces are valued for their health, social, economic, and environmental benefits. Outdoor physical activity is important for the wellbeing of youth, while playfulness is crucial for creativity and innovation. It is observed that in Pakistan the access of adolescent girls to public open spaces and school playgrounds is restricted, but there has been no prior scientific study. This research has studied the impediments in four planned and un-planned localities of Islamabad and Rawalpindi. The restrictions on girls are pervasive and become more severe upon their attaining puberty.

This paper reviews the available data on men’s and women’s land rights, identifies what can and cannot be measured by these data, and uses these measures to assess the gaps in the land rights of women and men. Building on the conceptual framework developed in 2014 by Doss et al., we utilize nationally representative individual- and plot-level data from Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste to calculate five indicators: incidence of ownership by sex; distribution of ownership by sex; and distribution of plots, mean plot size, and distribution of land area, all by sex of owner.

This issue brief highlights the challenges women are facing on access to lands, and the strategies in achieving gender justice for land rights - based from the results of the scoping studies on women and land in seven Asian countries (Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Philippines).

This publication is a collection of scoping studies on women and land in Bangladesh, Cambodia, India, Indonesia, Nepal, Pakistan, and Philippines. It outlines the statuses of women's land rights in each country, the legal frameworks covering such rights, the key factors promoting or impending women's land rights, and the strategies to address gender inequality and advance women's rights to own and benefit from the land.

In various countries around the world, land expropriation is considered as a major tool used by governments to assemble tracts of land for various activities aiming at public interest. However, determination of compensation which is regarded as a pre-requisite for land expropriation has been a source of controversy in this process. This paper attempts to find out how land valuation for compensation during expropriation is carried out in Rwanda, considering two expropriation projects in Kigali city.