Women own less than 20 percent of land in the world

Half of the world’s smallholder farmers are women

70 percent of Africa’s food is produced by women smallholder farmers

Abraço ao Cemitério do Povo Negro escravizado, em Santa Luzia, MG. Foto: Alenice Baeta

Almost ten years ago, global donors who were focused on the role of land and property rights in promoting economic growth, mitigating food insecurity, and addressing climate change issues, came together in a United Nations (UN) body to negotiate an international agreement for voluntary guidelines to strengthen and secure land rights.

There is an immense pressure on land in Uganda. The country has a rapidly growing population and is host to the world’s third largest refugee population. Particularly poor people struggle to get access to healthy food. Agriculture practices need to become more efficient and focused on the domestic market. The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (EKN) in Uganda works to improve food security in selected areas in the country. Among several food security projects, the EKN works with the LAND-at-scale program to improve land governance.

Our food system doesn’t work for everyone.

It’s not unusual for children to leave home when they become adults: it is rarer, though, that they come back to invigorate the communities they grew up in with new ideas and services.

That, however, is exactly what is happening in indigenous territories throughout Indonesia. It is called “Homecoming”, although it is a far cry from the more familiar Western use of the term that involves high school sports events and prom dances.

Our food systems are in urgent need of transformation, as humanity faces one of our biggest challenges yet; feeding a future population of 10 billion people with safe and nutritious food while keeping a healthy planet. Our food system has the power to tip the scales and transform the future of our planet and humankind.

The main objective of the LAND-at-scale program is to directly strengthen essential land governance components for men, women and youth that have the potential to contribute to structural, just, sustainable and inclusive change at scale. An ambitious objective, that cannot be achieved in isolation. Alignment is, therefore, a key factor in all LAND-at-scale activities - be it at project level for our country interventions or through our collaborative approach to knowledge management.

The COVID-19 crisis exacerbated land governance challenges, including addressing failures in land governance systems, a lack of transparency, systemic corruption, and lack of accessibility to data. It undermines development progress on global food security and has driven people into poverty, while governments take license to develop indigenous and community lands and thus fuel the climate crisis.

This session zoomed in on the local situation and challenges faced by grassroots communities and women in some low-Income countries. It provided an overview of support provided by Civil Society organizations (and governments) facilitating communities, women in particular, to step up the efforts to strengthen their land rights and to generate resilience in face of the climate and COVID-19 challenges they are facing.

More secure land tenure provides much better opportunities to face climate and COVID-19 challenges by investing in high biodiversity local food & income systems.