A Guidebook on Women Human Rights Defenders is aimed to help women human rights defenders name the specific risks, violations and constraints they face in their work.  It presents a practical discussion of the useful mechanisms developed by the state and also the civil society to provide redress and remedy, and to protect women human rights defenders.  It is intended to be used by human rights and other organisations to further a gender perspective in the monitoring and documentation of human rights. 

Dominant arguments about women’s land access stress the vulnerability of single women’s land rights in customary tenure areas. The vulnerability is based on long-held assumptions about customary tenure land governance, land use and gender relations. The paper seeks to contribute to the debate on customary tenure area land access, landlessness and understanding customary tenure evolution. Although single women have increasingly insecure tenure on customary tenure lands, in those systems spaces exist for single women to negotiate access to land.

This paper is a summary of a regional case study on gender, land and decentralisation. The main study has two parts: three portraits of women showing different examples of access to natural resources and local leadership; and a general report based on the portraits and on interviews carried out in seven study sites in Maradi and Zinder regions in Niger.

This study stresses the importance of land for the rural poor as a source of livelihood and describes the gendered and often inequitable experience of access to land and other natural resources. It also provides a set of guidelines for actions to increase women's access to land, including awareness raising, and emphasises the need for better contextual udnerstanding of the gendered aspects in land allocation and adjudication. The report also provides suggestions for indicators of secure land access prior to, during and after programs of intervention.

In the experience of GROOTS Kenya, HIV-positive widows are often thrown out of their matrimonial homes, their land grabbed by in-laws as they are blamed for their husbands’ deaths and/or feared to die within a short period of time. Due to a lack of awareness on land rights, as well as the importance of retaining legal documents to lodge court cases, the ability of widows and orphans to control land and other family assets in Gatundu district is threatened.

In 2006, UNAIDS reported that almost half of the adults living with HIV and AIDS today were women. According to estimates, 38% of HIV-positive adults in India are women, and the number of young women, aged 15-24, living with HIV and AIDS is twice that of young men. HIV/AIDS has exposed the social inequities that predispose girls and women to HIV infection, but women need more than rights in order to protect themselves. In India, the AIDS epidemic magnifies the devastation of women’s property violations.

This is a report of a research project conducted in the Volta region of Ghana on women’s access to land. The authors conclude that women’s land tenure in this area is pervasively insecure. Specific customary norms in the matrilineal society perpetuate this insecurity and demonstrate the lack of implementation of legal measures set up to protect women against property rights discrimination. The authors give recommendations for improving women’s secure access to land, targeting the local community, NGOs and legal aid clinics as well as the government.

Security of Tenure is one of the cornerstones of Millennium Development Goal 7 on the improvement of the lives of slum dwellers, and is the main focus of the Global Campaign for Secure Tenure

New directions in development assistance and agricultural investments must recognize and support women's involvement in the full agricultural value chain from production to processing to marketing. This report reviews current thinking and practice on increasing agricultural productivity, both subsistence and commercial agriculture, and examines what is known about women's roles in both sectors.

Poverty, particularly among female-headed households in Uganda, is strongly related to lack of access to and ownership of productive resources. Recent land reform necessitates inquiry to determine whether it has improved women’s marginalized status with regard to land ownership and access.

In rural Africa and the Middle East, many ecosystems are on the verge of collapse. The interplay of social, ecological, and political-economic forces has compromised the ability of farmers to sustain their precious soil. As a result, farmers, and especially women farmers, face a constant daily struggle to survive.

This paper illustrates the implications of rights-based approaches (RBA) for development practice. It acknowledges that a RBA is increasingly considered essential for holistic development, but also the challanges faced in translating this approach into practice, especially regarding participation and power.