The paper assesses risk tolerance, trust and trustworthiness among male and female youth group members in recently formed primary cooperative businesses in Ethiopia. Male members are found to be more risk tolerant, trusting and trustworthy than females. There is a strong positive correlation between individual risk tolerance and trust for male while this correlation is much weaker for female members. Individual risk tolerance is positively correlated with trustworthiness for males but not for females. Females are more trusting and trustworthy in groups with more risk tolerant members.

This paper analyses the impact of a low cost and restricted rights land certification program on the productivity of female-headed households. The analysis is based on plot level panel data from the East Gojjam and South Wollo Zones in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. The results suggest a positive and significant effect of certification on plot-level productivity, particularly on plots rented out to other operators.

This handbook is an introduction to the human rights of indigenous women. It provides some detail on the CEDAW as the only instrument specifically for women. It also provides a brief overview of the other available human rights mechanisms.

The guide consists of an overview of the gender relevant policy framework and initiatives at IFIs. It also contains a gender checklist which should help civil society organisations in determining whether gender considerations have been addressed during the preparation and implementation of IFI-financed projects and programmes. The checklist is divided into three parts:

• broad gender considerations during the project/programme preparation, monitoring and evaluation stages,

• gender issues that need to be addressed during the assessment of projects in particular sectors

Fiji ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination Against Women in August, 1995. The initial report was submitted in 2000 and the Fiji delegation appeared before the UN CEDAW Committee of Experts for the constructive dialogue in 2002. Fiji has not submitted any report since. Therefore this document is the State combined 2nd, 3rd and 4th Periodic report and covers the period January 2003 to June 2008.

The resurgence of conservative patriarchal values in Tajikistan have led to the rise of early marriages and polygamy, compromising women’s and girls’ opportunities to realize their full potential to live quality lives, and have deterred women from fully participating in and benefitting from development. The report provides sector-specific gender analyses and identifies entry points for mainstreaming gender in agriculture and natural resources, education, energy, entrepreneurship and SME development, and transport.

This practitioner’s guide explains how to promote gender-responsive forest tenure reform in community-based forest regimes. It is aimed at those taking up this challenge in developing countries. There is no one single approach to reforming forest tenure practices for achieving gender equality and women’s empowerment. Rather, it involves taking advantage of opportunities that emerge in various institutional arenas such as policy and law-making and implementation, government administration, customary or community-based tenure governance, or forest restoration at the landscape scale.

While there is no right to land codified in international human rights law, the Convention for the Elimination of All forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), provides for women’s right to own and inherit property without discrimination on the basis of sex. Afghanistan ratified CEDAW in 2003, without reservations. CEDAW (Article 14) also calls for rural women to have equal access to economic opportunities, to credit and loans, social security programs, and to adequate living conditions, including access to housing.

‘A Guide on Land and Property Rights in Pakistan’ was designed and prepared to facilitate the basic understanding of the complex principles of the Pakistani land and revenue administration system. The first edition, printed in December 2011, was warmly received by lawyers, national civil society organisations, community leaders, local authorities, donor agencies, and international affairs organisations, engaged in relief, rehabilitation, development or other similar works that necessitate some basic understanding of the land administration system in Pakistan.

Women have largely been excluded from the ownership and control of land in Pakistan, which is the single most important source of income and status in the agricultural economy. This systematic exclusion stems from multiple factors at both the policy and societal level, which include multiple and contradictory sources of law that fail to resolve the issue of women’s right to property as well as cultural bias and discriminatory practices that arise from the prevalent male-dominant mindset in rural areas.

Why do activist groups representing some of society’s most marginalized employ legalistic forms of ‘rights talk’ when the reality of securing rights via the judicial system is almost unimaginable? The article considers this question in relation to the work of the Malaysian non-governmental organisation (NGO) EMPOWER who, in 2011, produced the Malaysian Women’s Human Rights Report focusing attention on the rights of informal sector workers, refugees, sexual minorities and women’s rights under non-Islamic family law.

Drawing on original survey research, this study examines how lay Muslims in Malaysia understand foundational concepts in Islamic law. The survey finds a substantial disjuncture between popular legal consciousness and core epistemological commitments in Islamic legal theory. In its classic form, Islamic legal theory was marked by its commitment to pluralism and the centrality of human agency in Islamic jurisprudence. Yet in contemporary Malaysia, lay Muslims tend to understand Islamic law as being purely divine, with a single “correct” answer to any given question.