This is a 2009 study undertaken by the Rural Development Institute, now Landesa, and authored by Elisa Scalise. It focuses on six South Asian countries (Afghanistan, Bangladesh, India, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka) and addresses both formal and customary laws and pratices governing women's inheritance rights.
[From CIFOR] This article explores the effects that gender composition of forest user groups has on property rights and forestry governance, based on data from 290 forest user groups in Kenya, Uganda, Bolivia, and Mexico. Findings indicate gender composition of user groups is important, but not always in the expected ways.
We the Rural Women’s Assembly of Southern Africa, meeting in Durban on the event of the 17th Conference of Parties of the UNFCCC in Durban from 30 November to 5 December 2011 demand that governments take the following immediate steps to address the clear and present danger posed to rural communities by the climate crisis.
[From the Foro Internacional de Mujeres Indígenas] Today, December 10 — International Human Rights Day, we want to acknowledge the hard work of millions of indigenous women who in adverse conditions, hit with multiple forms of violence contribute with their resilience capabilities to the lives of their people’s. To them we dedicate this day, to the defenders of the rights of indigenous women who run enormous risks to do their job.
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 report considers the causes, processes and impacts of rangeland fragmentation on pastoralists in Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. Causes and processes include privatisation of resources, commercial investment, invasion of land by non-native plants, commercialisation including growth in individual enclosures, and conservation/National Parks. The impacts include increasing wealth divides and a growing inability to overcome and vulnerability to drought.
Significant progress has been made over the past decade or so in the development of policy and legislation that support the recognition of customary rights to land, with important legal rulings in Tanzania, Uganda, Mozambique, South Sudan, and South Africa. At the same time, the strengthening of communities’ traditional rights to use resources has progressed through community forest reserves and community conservation areas.
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?".
You can find the following documents below, in attachment:
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).