Land rights are among the fundamental rights of women. Supporting women to secure their land rights ensures equity in ownership, and improved livelihood opportunities for rural women. It further contributes to food security, addresses poverty, provides a basis for climate action, and promotes long-term equitable economic growth. However, a lack of awareness about land legislation and limited social freedoms in rural societies hinder the realisation of these rights. Three land-governance-focused projects implemented by GIZ Ethiopia and Djibouti , in collaboration with Habitat for Humanity International project Stand for Her Land (#S4HL) and the Women Land Rights Task Force (WLRTF), are working to improve women’s land rights in Ethiopia.

The EU Deforestation Regulation enters into force today. This law prohibits the placing on the European market of cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soy and wood that is linked to deforestation.

In Kenya, the Mau forest is the ancestral home of an indigenous community called the Ogiek people. The Ogiek community comprises 20,000 members, about 15,000 of whom inhabit the greater Mau Forest Complex, a land mass of about 400,000 hectares. 

"They come here promising us everything," said one affected Ugandan. "We believed them. Now we are landless, the compensation money is gone, what fields we have left are flooded, and dust fills the air."

In southern Cameroon, about 150km from the border with the Democratic Republic of Congo, a bitter story from the colonial era is playing out. Rubber companies are once again destroying rainforests and communities.

President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni Tibuhaburwa has halted the tabling of land act reforms, saying Uganda has more serious problems to deal with than those issues arising from the current land law.

2023 marks two decades since the adoption of the Maputo Protocol. The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol) is arguably the most progressive legally binding instrument on women’s and human rights instruments globally. A total of 44 African countries have signed and ratified it.

While land that is legally designated or owned by indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities worldwide between 2015 and 2020 has risen in acreage, in sub-Saharan Africa the opposite applies, says a report by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI): It decreased by 2.4 million hectares (Mha) – from 9.6 percent of land across the 23 countries in Africa analysed as of 2015 to 9.4 percent of land across the same countries in 2020.

In the absence of an economic and social incentive to invest in improving their living conditions, alongside the threat of routine evictions, low-income communities resort to inexpensive and readily available building materials, which are not resilient or sustainable.

Excessive and erratic rainfall has caused devastating flooding, hitting parts of Bangladesh hard. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said there will be no quick respite for the country.