Goal 5 of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) “Achieve gender equality and empower all women and girls” recognizes the fundamental role of women in achieving poverty reduction, food security and nutrition.
From the outset, the development of agriculture has been strongly associated with women’s endeavour. In fact, women’s contribution to agriculture goes back to the origins of farming and the domestication of animals when the first human settlements were established more than 6 000 years ago. Over the years, the division of responsibilities and labour within households and communities tended to place farming and nutrition-related tasks under women’s domain. Nowadays, in many societies women continue to be mainly responsible for family food security and nutrition.
Across rural Africa, land legislation struggles to be properly implemented, and most resource users gain access to land on the basis of local land tenure systems.
In recent years, local people and rural communities have assumed increasing prominence in strategies for natural resource management.This paper briefly reviews some of the central legal issues that are associated with this shift. In doing so, its goals are limited. It does not ad dress fundamental questions about when, where and what kind of management works, nor attempt to identify the political, social, economic and environmental ingredient s for success – subjects on which there is a huge, if still inconclusive, literature.
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