The Medium Term Development Plan 2011-2015 (MTDP) is a 5-year rolling development plan that sets the sector strategies, targets, deliverables and their projected estimated cost of implementation. The MTDP is aimed at translating the Papua New Guinea Development Strategic Plan 2010-2030 (PNGDSP) into tangible results.

Includes gender in the existing literature, entrenched gender discrimination, case studies from Ethiopia, Zambia and Rwanda, ways forward, conclusion. Based on a larger study for the International Land Coalition.

 
*Ana Isabel Arenas Saavedra **Claudia Patricia Collazos Naranjo
Una Ley no va a resolver la enorme deuda social del Estado colombiano con las mujeres rurales, pero podría ayudar a que éste comience a cumplir con las obligaciones largamente postergadas. Este es el convencimiento que guía a varias organizaciones de mujeres que están gestionando más acción gubernamental para el sector, pero normada por políticas públicas y no como expresión de asistencialismo o dádivas políticas.
Un poco de historia

The pastoral areas of Ethiopia are witnessing radical change in terms of both increasingly restricted mobility and access to vital resources. A cause and consequence of such constraints has been a move toward sedentarised forms of livestock and agricultural production. This is occurring in a political and socioeconomic vacuum, in which the customary institutions responsible for resource allocation and access to land are becoming weaker, and where the Ethiopian government has yet to develop a clear policy or strategy for resource distribution and tenure security in pastoral areas.

Este texto busca recoger los resultados de un estudio, con modesto alcance, realizado en torno a la relación de las mujeres rurales con la tierra, en un contexto de conflicto armado, en el municipio de Buga, Valle, Colombia, en la última década.

Includes inheritance: a key way women access land; local mechanisms: ‘custom’, power dynamics and lack of engagement; formal justice system: community pariah status and systemic barriers. The lack of access to land cannot be framed as a failing of formal or informal systems, but rather as issues with both. The key to increasing access to justice at both formal and informal levels is to address power dynamics and understand how they operate to the detriment of women.

The recent Constitutional Court judgment rendering the Communal Land Rights Act (CLARA) unconstitutional (Tongoane and Others v Minister for Agriculture and Land Affairs and Others) must not be allowed to throw decentralisation policy making into disarray. Decentralisation holds much potential for lively, participatory democratic law making and enforcement, through which rural women can gain greater power and secure more rights. 

Strengthening women's inheritance and property rights can be an effective means of decreasing poverty and increasing gender equality, and thereby accelerating progress towards the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). This paper presents two case studies from Rwanda and Ethiopia to illustrate the potential impact that advocacy, legislative reform and law enforcement in this area can have on the achievement of the MDGs in developing countries.

In 2004, FAO, IFAD, and the International Land Coalition (ILC) jointly published a report on progress towards the Convention on the Elimination of all forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), with respect to the status of rural women. This report provided an historical background to CEDAW and its Optional Protocol (OP 1999) as well as an overview on land issues as reflected in the reports submitted by States Parties.

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?".