Research & Resources

Infographic: Women and Land: This infographic highlights the need to consider what additional gains in agricultural productivity and reducing hunger could result if women had equal access to land, along with other agricultural inputs and resources.

Making Equal Rights Real: Taking Effective Action to Overcome Global Challenges

January, 2012

Making Equal Rights Real is a collection of insights from leaders around the world describing effective approaches to creating greater social and economic equality. The Landesa Center for Women’s Land Rights’ executive director, Renée Giovarelli, and director Elisa Scalise, authored the chapter Promoting equity in economic rights: the case of gender and land rights.

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Gender in Agriculture Source Book. (World Bank, UN Food and Agricultural Organization, and International Fund for Agricultural Development)

2009

In most developing countries, land is a critical asset. Land rights—whether customary or formal—act as a form of economic access to key markets, and often confer rights to other local natural resources, such as trees, pasture, and water. However, women may not fully participate in these benefits if they do not have independent or direct rights over land. The Gender in Agriculture Source Book is an essential primer for issues of gender and land rights. Content for Module 4, Gender Issues in Land Policy Administration, was provided in part by attorneys at the Landesa Center for Women’s Land Rights.

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Securing women’s right to land and livelihoods: A key to ending hunger and fighting AIDS

2008

Guaranteeing women’s land and property rights is one of the most powerful but most neglected weapons to stem the spread of the HIV and AIDS epidemic. This briefing paper from Action Aid highlights the link between gender inequality and HIV and AIDS, through which women’s unequal social and economic status creates situations of poverty, hunger, violence and abuse. Breaking that link requires taking action on women’s rights to land and livelihoods.

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Women and land tenure. FAO Focus: Women and Food Security

2004

In order for women farmers, who are responsible for 60 to 80 percent of the food production in developing countries, to use land more efficiently and thereby make a greater contribution to food security, they need access to land, management control of land-based resources and economic incentives that security of tenure provides.

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Land Tenure, Gender, and Globalization: Research and Analysis from Africa, Asia, and Latin America

2010

Drawing from field research in Cameroon, Ghana, Vietnam, and the Amazon forests of Brazil, Bolivia, and Peru, this book explores the relationship between gender and land, revealing the workings of global capital and of people’s responses to it. For instance, in the Amazon, the focus is on the social movements that have emerged in the struggles over the extraction of Brazil nuts and babaçu kernels in an increasingly globalized market. In Vietnam, the process of decollectivizing rights to land is examined with a view to understanding how gender and other social differences are reworked in a market economy.

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