New infographic by FAO and PIM on the correct use of land ownership statistics

“Making sense of Land, Statistics and Gender”, a new infographic by the Gender and Land Rights database (GLRD) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and CGIAR Research Program on Policies, Institutions, and Markets (PIM) explores the correct use of land ownership statistics (ownership understood in a broad sense beyond individual property rights) and highlights how gender can influence land rights. 

In many parts of the world, women’s rights to land and property are systematically denied. Women have fewer or less secure rights than men, and discriminatory attitudes and practices undermine them. This leaves many women vulnerable, and almost entirely dependent on the men in their lives for basic economic survival. 

Dependance on men can lead to entrapment in abusive relationships, less control over sexual relations, and less ability to produce food or secure food.

This Gender Evaluation Criteria (GEC) matrix has been extracted from the GLTN publication entitled Designing and Evaluating Land Tools with a Gender Perspective: A Training Package for Land Professionals

Language: English, Spanish, French, Arabic

The crisis that engulfed the Central African Republic (CAR) in the end of 2012 resulted in the perpetration of gross human rights violations, including the widespread looting and destruction of homes. As people fled the violence they left behind land which others occupied illegally. More than a year after the height of the crisis, approximately 440,000 Central Africans continue to be internally displaced. Almost half a million are refugees in neighbouring countries.

Palestinian women living in refugee camps and gatherings in Lebanon have little opportunity to realise their HLP rights. They face the double discrimination, challenged by both formal Lebanese law and familial Palestinian social systems.

In 2001, the Lebanese Government passed a law forbidding people who do not hold citizenship to a recognised state from getting property rights in the country. This has left many Palestinian refugees either losing property that they owned, or unable to inherit property from family members.

Land is of tremendous importance in South Sudan. It represents community, belonging and place as well as provides a source of income, subsistence and survival. Control of land and resources was at the centre of the conflict that lasted five decades, leading to South Sudan’s independence in 2011.

Women cocoa farmers are central to the sustainability of the cocoa supply chain and cocoa-growing communities. Too often unrecognized and undervalued, women’s labor makes significant contributions to the amount of cocoa produced, which is under increasing demand.

Follow Rose, and see her impact, as she travels the Rwandan countryside educating communities about women’s rights to land.

The 2003 Maputo Declaration on Food and Agriculture committed signatory countries across Africa to a 10% allocation of national budgets to agriculture by 2008. To bolster the implementation of this commitment, the Comprehensive Africa Agriculture Development Programme (CAADP) was established. But 12 years later, the situation for women smallholder farmers across Africa has hardly changed.

From 25 January to 5 February 2016, the Land Portal hosted a discussion on the Gender Evaluation Criteria (GEC), a flexible framework comprised of 6 criteria and 22 evaluation questions with possible indicators that can be adapted to a wide range of different situations that were developed as a flagship tool of the Global Land Tool Network (GLTN) and its partners, and have been piloted and disseminated among a wide range of stakeholders at global and country level since 2007.

This paper analyzes the effects of land
market restrictions on structural change from agriculture to
non-farm in a rural economy. This paper develops a
theoretical model that focuses on higher migration costs due
to restrictions on alienability, and identifies the
possibility of a reverse structural change where the share
of nonagricultural employment declines. The reverse
structural change can occur under plausible conditions: if

While scholars agree on the importance
of land rental markets for structural transformation in
rural areas, evidence on the extent and nature of their
operation, including potential obstacles to their improved
functioning, remains limited. This study uses
household-level data from six countries to start filling
this gap and derive substantive as well as methodological
lessons. The paper finds that rental markets transfer land