This Backgrounder is the first in a multi-authored series on Cultivating Gender Justice. In this series, we seek to uncover the structural foundations of sexism in the food system and highlight the ways people, communities, organizations, and social movements are dismantling the attitudes, institutions, and structures that hold patriarchy in place. To end hunger and malnutrition, we must end injustices in the food and agriculture system.

Production, availability and accessibility of reliable data and statistics are of fundamental importance in monitoring and in taking evidence-based decisions for good land governance. The demand for data as evidence is increasingly focused to monitor global and national developmental status and targets. Implementation of intentionally agreed commitments like Sustainable development Goals (SDGs) influence data production and availability, and the development of national statistical capacities (OECD, 2015)1 .

Amid the realities of major political turbulence, there was growing recognition in 2016 that the land rights of Indigenous Peoples and local communities are key to ensuring peace and prosperity, economic development, sound investment, and climate change mitigation and adaptation. Despite equivocation by governments, a critical mass of influential investors and companies now recognize the market rationale for respecting community land rights.

The Constitution of Kenya 2010 apportions responsibility of planning to both National and County governments. The County Government Act, 2012 obligates county governments to prepare and implement County Integrated Development Plans (CIDP). The CIDPs are, according to the act, five year plans that will form the basis of annual budgetary allocation by the county governments.

Poor rural women in developing countries are critical to the survival of their families. Fertile land is their lifeline. But the number of people negatively affected by land degradation is growing rapidly. Crop failures, water scarcity and the migration of traditional crops are damaging rural livelihoods. Action to halt the loss of more fertile land must focus on households. At this level, land use is based on the roles assigned to men and women.

International aid communities have recognized women’s participation in development and the improvement of women’s status in the developing countries as a key issue since the 1960s, and the concept of “Women in Development (WID)” has been emphasised as a development agenda in the 1970s. In the 1980s, with the newly proposed concept of “Gender and Development (GAD)”, an effort for “gender mainstreaming” has been regarded as an effective mean for firmly practicing the GAD approach in the international community.

Covers background, property grabbing from widows, legal standards on the rights of widows, recommendations. Includes the rights of older people, the invisibility of widows in global policy and development, harmful practices and widows in Zimbabwe, illustrative cases of property grabbing from widows, registration of marriages, widowhood and child marriage, the impact of property grabbing on widows’ lives, remedies.

FAO presentation with an overview of SDG indicators 5a1 and 5a2.  

The NGO Centro Terra Viva (CTV) with funding from the World Resources Institute (WRI) implemented a project seeking to promote gender mainstreaming in the policies and practice of large scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) for economic investments. The study was centered on recognizing opportunities to strengthen the role and involvement of women as actors in decision-making in the resettlement process, particularly given the context of a growing economic and commercial appetite for land acquisition.

O governo de Moçambique regulou o reassentamento involuntário, causado por investimentos económicos, através de uma lei que foi aprovada em 2012. A lei inclui boas práticas globais sobre a política de reassentamento involuntário como a compensação por perdas tangíveis e intangíveis e redes sociais dilaceradas; a preparação de um Plano de Acção para o reassentamento, que orienta o projecto de reassentamento; entre outros. Este relatório apresenta os resultados de um estudo sobre a medida na qual a igualdade de género e as questões de género são integradas na lei de 2012.

This gender study forms part of the International Land Coalition’s ‘Commercial Pressures on Land Initiative’ Global Study. As stated by the International Land Coalition (ILC), the goal of this initiative is to support the efforts of ILC members and other stakeholders to influence global, regional and national processes on land to enable secure and equitable access to land for poor women and men in the face of increasing commercial demand for land (ILC 2010a, emphasis added).

The Restoration Opportunities Assessment Methodology (ROAM) was developed by IUCN and the World Resources Institute (WRI) to assist countries in identifying opportunities for forest landscape restoration (FLR), analysing priority areas at a national or sub-national level, and designing and implementing FLR interventions. As part of IUCN’s effort to update the methodology, these guidelines have been developed to ensure the application of ROAM and the ensuing FLR implementation, including any policy uptake and land-use planning, is gender responsive.