The Pastoral Women’s Council (PWC) is a community-based organisation established in 1997 in Tanzania. It was founded to promote the development of Maasai pastoralist women and children by facilitating their access to education, health, social services and economic empowerment. It seeks to address women’s marginalisation in patriarchal Maasai culture, as well as the poverty among the Maasai that has long been underpinned by land access restrictions for pastoralists, hunters and gatherers.

[Executive Summary] In rural Rwanda, women, particularly widows and divorced or abandoned women, face severe obstacles protecting and upholding their interests in land, resulting in diminishing land tenure security. Women have weak rights under customary law, and while reforms have strengthened their statutory land rights, such entitlements have limited practical value in rural areas where customary law dominates.

[From the editorial] This issue of Feminist Africa seeks to explore the interconnections among economic liberalisation policies, land and resource tenures, and labour relations in the structuring of gendered livelihoods in sub-Saharan Africa. The focus on livelihoods departs somewhat from Feminist Africa’s niche in providing cutting-edge feminist analysis of issues of sexual politics and identities, national politics and democratisation processes, higher education and feminist research methodologies.

In this booklet the Sustainable Economic Development Department of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs explains the bottlenecks women face in the production, preparation, processing and trading of food. The booklet also presents an overview of Dutch-funded organisations and projects focused on food security that are working to enhance the economic empowerment of women.

The publication starts by arguing that the first condition for sustainable food production is enhancing women’s land rights.

The right to own and inherit property is a crosscutting right that traverses the realm of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights. This right is central to the true empowerment of everyone in society (men, women, boys and girls) and is a key developmental right. It is the common right to all societies and cultures. It is central to securing the dignity of all members of the society.

WOLREC undertook this action research in order to enhance women’s bargaining power through improved access and control over land in the patrilineal and matrilineal communities in Southern and Northern Malawi. For WOLREC, as an action-orientated NGO, the exact nature of the relationship between women’s bargaining power in the household and their access to, and control over land is key to deciding which interventions improve poor rural women’s access to economic justice.

[From 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.

This Policy brief provides a summary into women’s land tenure issues in East Africa. The brief aims to highlight the gap between women’s land tenure security and the policy provisions to secure women’s access to land. The brief is aimed at policymakers, administrators, women in the community, intermediary institutions and non-governmental institutions who work to improve women’s access to land.

This lesson brief examines the ways in which women's rights groups collaborated and engaged in the land law reform process in Tanzania. It is part of the Focus on Land in Africa: Land Tenure and Property Right online educational tool.