Includes key features of current land policy, land law implementation – recording local rights, registering customarily held rights, knowing your rights, the public sector response, private sector and other non-customary land rights, historical land units, land concentration, benefits to local people – community consultations, the positive side of the picture.

Contains executive summary; food insecurity and the AIDS epidemic; barriers to women’s farming; women’s land rights; economic and social empowerment; violence against women; inheritance rights and property grabbing; politics, ideologies and vested interests; recommendations.

Contains women’s rights and state-led agrarian and market based land reforms; reinstating the state; engendering customary tenure; rights of indigenous people and marginalised groups; human rights violations; HIV/AIDS; the ‘feminisation of agriculture’. Calls for a new agrarian reform agenda in which the state plays a central role, ensuring that land is established as a common public good, and that its benefits are enjoyed equitably by women and men, regardless of race, class or ethnicity.

A framework to strengthen land rights, enhance productivity and secure livelihoods. Includes background; the context of the land question; land in the national development process; the process of land policy development; land policy implementation; tracking progress in land policy development and implementation; overall conclusion.

Covers the rush to acquire land in Africa by foreign governments and private investors, fuelled by fears for global food security in the face of climate change and volatile food prices on the international market. Warns that the political and economic risks of these land purchases are colossal and outweigh any gains, and argues that African governments must make food security and sufficiency for their own people paramount.

Includes official land rights in Kenya; refusing inheritance – widows and daughters in the patrilineage, dispute trajectories; institutionalizing women’s exclusion – local control boards, local dispute tribunals, formal courts; shifting the debate; working with constructive values in this context. The problem needs to be tackled using the avenues that currently promote the marginalization of women; the socio-cultural value systems that determine which behaviour, arguments, and actions are legitimate in a community.

Baseline survey which includes a literature review. Findings cover land and livelihoods, land ownership and security of tenure, land rights and decision making, land market and transactions, land disputes. Concludes that the volume of land transactions is too low to support a transformation from subsistence to commercial agriculture, as planned. Smallholder farmers have limited capital options making increased land utilization impossible. Tenure security for women is still far from a reality. There is a need to strengthen land rights of widows and orphans.

Includes women’s land rights and tenure security in a context of legal pluralism and land tenure privatization; competing legal systems and land rights protection on the ground � what is going wrong? Argues that in a context of increasing land scarcity, high population pressure and progressing land tenure privatization, men are increasingly taking advantage of their superior position within the patrilineal tenure system, advancing their own interests at the expense of weaker family members, first and foremost the women in the family.

Examines some contemporary policy discourses on land tenure reform in sub-Saharan Africa and their implications for women’s interests in land. Demonstrates an emerging consensus among a range of influential policy institutions (including the World Bank, IIED and Oxfam GB), lawyers and academics about the potential of so-called customary systems of land tenure to meet the needs of all land users and claimants. African women lawyers are much more equivocal about trusting the customary, preferring to look to the State for laws to protect women’s interests.

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.

Short summary of a Ph.D. thesis. The dominance of the white farm issue has delayed serious attention to more subtle land conflicts. Thesis focuses on the continued maintenance of communal land rights by urban property owners. Explores what would happen if these rights disappeared. In reality and in the absence of explicit state policy, poor families and women are already relinquishing these rights, which has very practical implications for urbanisation.

The land question in Kenya has never been solved. Land is a pertinent source of livelihood, the problem has persisted and in a number of years caused chaos as people grow impatient. Over time, there have been complaints from various communities and recently, the past governments have sought to listen the ailing communities. The National Land Policy and the National Land Commission characterize efforts to remedy the continued situation bedeviling the African communities.