For more than five years, the Women’s Land Tenure Security (WOLTS) Project has been investigating the intersection of gender and land relations in mining-affected pastoralist communities in Mongolia and Tanzania. The aim has been to develop a methodology for long-term community engagement and capacity building to protect and support the land rights of all vulnerable people – thus to fully mainstream attention to gender equity in land tenure governance within a framework that would facilitate improvements in community land rights across the board.

The project has demonstrated that investing in a diverse group of gender and land champions, women and men, can be a game changer both for women and for the wider community. The local champions nurtured through the WOLTS training programme are reinvigorating local power structures to strengthen and protect the rights of women and other vulnerable groups and delivering real improvements for women’s land rights and community land rights alike. The evidence to date demonstrates that the WOLTS methodology can help to empower communities to combat entrenched patriarchal norms and challenge land grabbing more broadly across the Global South. In the pilot communities, the WOLTS approach created new leadership spaces for women, changes to social norms within households, and raised awareness of gender-based violence.

In the webinar, WOLTS team leader, Elizabeth Daley, provided an overview of the project and its results as well as its potential to be applied in other settings. Michael Taylor, Director of the International Land Coalition, spoke from a global perspective on the potential for the project to contribute to more equitable land governance for billions of people reliant on community land rights. WOLTS senior team members, Joyce Ndakaru (HakiMadini, Tanzania) and Narangerel Yansanjav (People Centered Conservation, Mongolia) provided examples from their respective countries on the impacts of training gender and land champions and wider applications of the project to date.

Chair:

Christopher Tanner, Mokoro

Panellists:

Elizabeth Daley, Mokoro

Michael Taylor, International Land Coalition

Joyce Ndakaru, HakiMadini

Narangerel Yansanjav, People Centered Conservation

The recording of the webinar is available here: https://youtu.be/Grn83dokfH0