The Commission on the Status of Women (CSW) is an intergovernmental body and functional commission of the United Nations Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) mandated to promote gender equality and the advancement of women. The fifty-sixth session of the CSW, which takes place at the UN Headquarters in New York from 27 February to 9 March 2012, will focus on the theme “The empowerment of rural women and their role in poverty and hunger eradication, development and current challenges”.

The  Beijing Platform for Action, an agenda for women's empowerment, spelled out a set of objectives and actions to be taken by governments, the international community, non-governmental organisations and the private sector to overcome obstacles to women's equality. Amongt the critical areas of concern relevant to women's land rights mentioned in the document are the following:

This page is meant to provide a quick overview of major reference to women's land rights in existing international instruments, as well as paragraphs related to women  - or more broadly gender - in the First Draft of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the context of National Food Security (VGs). The VGs are still under-negotiations under the auspices of the Committee of World Food Security, and are therefore still subject to change.

Judy Adoko, Executive Director at the Land and Equity Movement (LEMU, Uganda) sent us a set of documents as a contribution for the on-line discussion "How can women's land rights be secured?".

This paper on agroecology and women's empowerment in Brazil includes a long section on "The Right to Land and Natural Resources in Brazil"  from a feminist perspective. It is published by the Association of Women’s Rights in Development (AWID). The summary of this article follows. 

From 23 January to 6 February, ILC held an online discussion leading up to the ILC-IFAD-FAO side event at the Commission on the Status of Women (CSW), 27 February – 9 March 2012, New York. The discussion was held simultaneously on the Land Portal and in the FSN-Forum – 70 contributions were received from 32 countries, from grassroots activists, researchers, NGOs and government staff.

I am sharing this extremely important report from Margaret Sekaggya, the Special Rapporteur of the situation of human rights defenders (2011). In 2007 the former Special Rapporteur, Hina Jilani, affirmed that “the second most vulnerable group when it comes to danger of being killed because of their activities in the defence of human rights, are defenders working on land rights and natural resources” (Hina Jilani, 2007, Report submitted to the Human Rights Council, A/HRC/4/37).

Poor rural women are among the most vulnerable people in El Salvador, where the Reconstruction and Rural Modernization Programme was launched in 2003 to aid areas stricken by earthquakes two years earlier. Women’s land tenure was not initially a central theme of the programme. The issue had to be addressed, however, when women – a large segment of the target population – were unable to benefit from an investment fund for rural economic development because they had no access to land.

[From UN-Women] During this 56th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, we have witnessed passionate and dynamic discussion with a very high level of participation from governments and civil society.

For the full text of the document "Final study of the Human Rights Council Advisory Committee on the advancement of the rights of peasants and other people working in rural areas" please visit the UN Human Rights Council website ( English |

I invite you to read the last Dimitra newsletter from FAO, which includes several pages on women's land rights, with case studies from Niger, Mali and Madagascar. Below you can find an excerpt from the forward by Marcela Villarreal (Director, Gender, Equity and Rural Employment Division, FAO) and links to the three case studies.

I invite you to read this blog post by Amanda Richardson, Landesa. The post also mentions the issue brief, recently published by Landesa, collating some evidence on the relation between secure land rights, women, and improved household food security and nutrition. Women's land rights are the point of intersection between empowerment and nutrition.