Last month, India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, issued the first 0.1 million Rural Property Cards (RPCs) to communities across more than 763 villages in six states in rural India under the SVAMITVA scheme.
The ability of the Embera villages in Panama to shut off the road into their community, and to exclude outsiders, is based in large measure on the government’s official recognition of their indigenous collective land rights.
We represent around five percent of the population of humanity, but we preserve around eighty-two percent of the world's biodiversity. We have a very important role in thinking about sustaining the life of the planet and this responsibility has fallen on us. We believe that if we do exactly with our way of life the protection of all humanity, it is also important that humanity guarantees the life of our people from the territory. When the territory dies, two deaths occur, his and our identity's, because the living body remains, but the tradition dies.
Last week the world observed the International Day of Indigenous Peoples on Sunday, Aug. 9, amid a global pandemic that UN Secretary-General António Guterres noted has had a “devastating impact” on the world’s Indigenous communities.
It is depressing, discouraging, infuriating – pick your word – to see the scale and scope of abuse and discrimination aimed at women and girls worldwide.
Latin America’s indigenous and Afro-descendant communities are facing not just one pandemic, but three. Women bear the brunt of them all, which threatens communities’ very survival.
Anna Letaiko is a middle-aged woman with a soft voice that carries wisdom and strength. Her husband is an older man, and together they live in small mud house in Mundarara – a remote village in Longido district in Tanzania, accessible only by a rough dirt road. It is a Maasai community similar to the one in which I grew up, except that the community’s livelihood is based on mining and pastoralism while my community still depends on farming and pastoralism.
I met Anna through my work with WOLTS – a five-year action research project on women’s land rights in pastoral communities that are affected by mining. As a speaker of the Maasai language, my job is to facilitate and translate in training sessions and help develop training materials.
In Maasai culture, it is very rare for women to own land. Men see themselves as owning land on behalf of the whole family. If women do apply for land, they usually apply in the name of their husband or son.
However, the law in Tanzania (Land Act, 1999, and Village Land Act, 1999) grants women and men the same rights to land access, ownership and control. The law also says that women have the same rights in decision-making over land. What Maasai customs mean in practice is that women are denied the right to apply for land and own it themselves.
During our research we heard that, when women in Mundarara applied for land in their own names, their applications were ignored, not taken seriously, and even thrown away. Some women were even asked for sex in exchange for land documents.
Our aim through the WOLTS project is to support the community to find their own solutions to land rights problems. To help them achieve this, we asked them to select community ‘champions’ who would be trained in land rights, mining laws, investment laws, mineral valuation and legal procedures for licence applications, as well as gender-based violence.
Anna was one of the first champions to be trained in Mundarara. When we first started working in the community, Anna did not even know that she had the right to own land. After the WOLTS training sessions, she put in an application, and it was taken seriously.
A few months later, Anna received a small plot near the village centre where she wants to build a modern house. As a trained champion for gender equity, she has promised to help other women by raising awareness and assisting them to become land owners like herself.
The growth of artisanal mining in Mundarara has brought many changes to the community, including giving families new sources of income. Women are finding that they have more opportunities to earn money and participate in community and family decision-making, including through land ownership.
Documenting and sharing Anna Letaiko’s story reminded me how quickly life is changing in pastoral districts due to factors like mining. I hope it will inspire readers, raise the voices of less fortunate groups, and improve everyday life in communities similar to my own.
The 4th India Land and Development Conference, set to start next week, invites a wide variety of individuals and institutions to engage in thought-provoking and interdisciplinary conversations and analyses. More specifically, the Conference's theme Institutions, Innovations and Informations in Land Governance invites us all to think about the role that information sharing can play in helping to ensure effective land governance.
Author: Priti Darooka [1] with contributions by Farida Akhter
I want to thank IWRAW Asia Pacific for organising a two day strategic dialogue on Women Human Rights and Climate Justice. Some of the points shared here are points discussed at this dialogue in Bangkok in November 2019.
I also want to thank contributions by Feminist Land Platform members, especially Farida Akhter of Bangladesh.
A conversation with Annie Signorelli, Project Manager for Renewable Energy and Human Rights at the Business and Human Rights Resource Centre
This is the first interview in the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment's Climate Crisis, Global Land Use, and Human Rights Interview Series.
In 2018, every week more than three people were murdered, defending their land and environment from destructive industries like mining, logging and agribusiness. These killings represent the extreme end of a spectrum of violence and threats directed at land rights defenders.