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.

Publicly elected women representatives in India ought to take advantage of their influence to defend women’s rights.

To ensure that there is sustainability at the community level in its land rights and governance training programme, Land Rights Research and Resources Institute (HAKIARDHI), a Tanzanian national level organization that spearheads land rights of small-scale producers, uses land rights monitors (LRMs) in its program areas. In each of the selected villages of the program districts, two LRMs (a man and a woman) who have received land rights training from HAKIARDHI are democratically elected by villagers.

March 2014 –  This paper discusses a pragmatic, adaptive framework for understanding and taking action to strengthen women’s land tenure security in the context of customary tenure. The Framework defines secure land rights in terms of five elements, which each serves as the basis for distinct, measurable indicators upon which to base project assessment, design, and evaluation. This paper presents the Framework and suggests its potential as an analytical foundation for assessing the security of land rights, for designing projects or developing policies that protect and stren

March 2014 – In 2012, Landesa and the government of West Bengal, India, entered an innovative partnership aimed at using land to reduce risks facing rural adolescent girls, including poverty, malnutrition, lack of education, and early marriage. This paper addresses pilot project features including girls groups, peer leader methodologies, community engagement, a land rights and land-based livelihoods curriculum, and partnerships with government stakeholders.

For the purposes of this article, we address gender inequality as a dimension ofsocioeconomic inequality expressed in Costa Rica. Through the evaluation of a seriesof socioeconomic variables, we show that even when the country has moved forward interms of recognition of women rights, there is still much to do to achieve greater levels ofequality in the access to productive resources, socio-economic assets and employment.

Indigenous farmer in the municipality of Sayaxché, department of Petén, Guatemala, viewing the stunted corn crop on his land bordering an oil palm plantation. 

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Most analyses of violence in Darfur ignore the local dimension of the crisis, focusing instead on the region’s economic and political marginalization and climatic variability. However, agricultural change and other changes relating to the land-rights and land-use systems have led to competition and exclusion, and have played a major role in the collective violence that has raged throughout the region. Understanding these questions is essential for the successful resolution of political and policy debates in Darfur.

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This paper explores initial findings from four case studies in the Gender, Agriculture, and Assets Project on changes in gender relations in different agricultural interventions. It documents the adaptive measures projects are taking to encourage gender-equitable value chain projects. Findings suggest that the dairy and horticulture value chain cases have successfully increased the stock of both men’s and women’s tangible assets and those assets they own jointly.

This survey was planned and executed in order to address key policy and research questions which have arisen as priorities for the research agenda, but for which there has been a lingering data gap. Successful commercialization of farming enterprises and f

In this paper, the relationship of women’s individual and joint property ownership and the level of women’s input into household decisionmaking is explored with data from India, Mali, Malawi, and Tanzania. In the three African countries, women with individual landownership have greater input into household decisionmaking than women whose landownership is joint; both have more input than women who are not landowners.