Report presents grassroots women’s approaches to access justice with a focus on land and property rights in Africa. This community empowerment-based research undertaken by the Huairou Commission and its partner groups across 7 African countries – Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – showcases women’s rights challenges and effective strategies to improve women’s access to justice. These groups are making an impact through strategies such as community mapping exercises, local-to-local dialogues, and developing community watchdogs and training community paralegals.

Indigenous and community lands, crucial for rural livelihoods, are typically held under informal customary arrangements. This can leave the land vulnerable to outside commercial interests, so communities may seek to formalize their land rights in a government registry and obtain an official land document. But this process is often time-consuming, complex and costly and, in contrast, companies can acquire land relatively quickly and find short-cuts around regulatory burdens.

Despite increasing attention in recent years, little evidence has been available on the issue of women, land and corruption in Africa to inform effective policy-making. There has been no compilation of relevant background information, lessons learnt and approaches to tackling land corruption as it affects women. This publication aims to address that gap, providing practitioners and decision-makers with a compendium of research findings, contextual information and practical solutions to help fulfil women’s land rights.

Women disproportionately bear the negative impacts of large-scale land investments (in agribusiness, extractives, logging) in the global South.

O presente artigo analisa o processo pedagógico da luta de gênero que ocorre dentro da luta pela terra a partir do protagonismo das mulheres trabalhadoras do campo.

La investigación como un tejido de relaciones, complicidad y empatía
Ruth Bautista Durán

This report reviews trends since the GLF in Dakar in May 2015 to the GLF in Bandung in September 2018. It draws on 21 submissions from 18 ILC members and three ILC initiatives, covering a total of 30 countries across different continents. The submissions were made in response to an open call issued by the ILC Secretariat in March 2018. They provided insights about some of the issues that members are grappling with.

Transparency International’s experience shows clear links between the issues of land governance, women’s rights, corruption and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These links are especially prevalent in lower-income countries, where people’s reliance on their land is greatest, and land governance and women’s rights are often weak – as highlighted in our 2018 resource book Women, Land and Corruption. 

Oxfam India is part of a global movement working to fight poverty, injustice and inequality; in India it works in seven focus state. Oxfam India aims to improve poor people’s access, rights and entitlements over land and natural resources in order to support and augment their livelihoods. Through its programme on smallholder agriculture, Oxfam India focuses on socialising the identity of women as farmers, strengthening the economic leadership of women farmers, ensuring their land rights and making public investments in agriculture accessible to small farmers, especially women farmers.

Investors are buying up vast tracks of land across the developing world in a modern day ‘land rush’. New analysis by Oxfam explores where land is changing hands and why. It finds that investors appear to be targeting countries with weak governance in order to secure land quickly and cheaply – putting the homes and livelihoods of some of the world’s most vulnerable communities at risk. Oxfam’s GROW campaign is calling on the World Bank to lead the fight against land grabs.

Soybean production in Paraguay now takes up 80 per cent of cultivated land, displacing agricultural production by family farmers and indigenous populations and deepening inequality in access to land.