Often, it starts away from the camera’s eye, in significant incremental steps that lay the foundation for structural, durable, and profound transformations.
Here are examples of three projects we’re nurturing. Each started with important, meaningful changes in FY 2011. Each has the potential for big impact.
Women work the land but rarely hold secure rights to it.
The majority of Kenya’s people continue to live under this customary legal system where women are disadvantaged, particularly in property rights. Under the customary law of most ethnic groups, rarely can a woman inherit land from her father or be the sole administrator of her husband’s estate (unless she has her children’s consent), and she usually can only continue to live on the land as a guest of male relatives.
The problem is not stubborn, old-fashioned, or recalcitrant traditional village elders. Interviews with elders suggest that the problem is purely a knowledge gap – elders simply don’t know the details of the new constitution. The impact of this knowledge gap can be seen in any rural village.
The opening was a historic moment: the center is the first of its kind in India, and is sorely needed in Odisha, where most women are illiterate and poor. Almost half of all rural households in the state don’t have legal title to the land they till, and women are particularly vulnerable, as their names are rarely included on documentation.
“Opportunities arise and you want to take advantage of them,” said Gregory Rake, India country director for Landesa/RDI. “You don’t want the window of opportunity to close.”Gregory Rake,
This has been the case in Odisha, where the local district collector of Ganjam district, after working with Landesa/RDI on improving the state’s program to provide land rights to the poor, came up with the idea for a women’s land rights center in 2009.
“He said, ‘I want to create a center to help women. You tell me how to do it,’” recalls Sanjoy Patnaik, director of our Odisha operations. “He had the vision and the wherewithal. He just lacked the know-how.”
“Opportunities arise and you want to take advantage of them,” said Gregory Rake, India country director for Landesa/RDI. “You don’t want the window of opportunity to close.”
The groundwork for the historic opening of the center involved convening conferences to gather expert opinion, as well as in-depth interviews with 65 poor men and women in the project area, and holding 27 discussion groups in nine nearby villages to determine the need for such a center.
What Landesa/RDI learned was troubling; large numbers of men had left to look for work in the city. Many were never heard from again, leaving their wives to look after their children alone in abject poverty. We redoubled our efforts to design the center.
The first step in helping these women and their families is educating them. Women who don’t know their rights, which is what our research showed, don’t ask for help.
The women, armed with little more than a sense that they deserve better, are now finding their way into the center. Some are widows who were thrown off their land by their in-laws, others are mothers neglected by their own children.
The opening of the center marks an important step toward what we know is a long journey for women in Odisha to have more control over the land they farm. We hope next year to bring you the stories of the historic changes these women and communities have experienced – children going to school and learning to read, mothers investing in their land and feeding their families. All because of a committed partner who championed a great idea whose time has finally come.
The invitation to coordinate these highly sensitive and important discussions illustrates how Landesa, working in China since 1987, has become a member in a select club of outside advisors welcomed by China’s senior policy makers as they guide the transformation of the world’s most populous country.
Despite China’s emergence as the world’s factory floor, an estimated 36 percent of China’s population remains desperately poor. Rural China lags significantly behind urban China on almost every socio-economic measure, from life expectancy and education to health and income. The country is rocked by an estimated 500 protests and riots a day. Sixty-five percent of them are related to this disparity and to insecure land rights.
On the table are critical reforms that would narrow the scope of land takings, guarantee farmers sufficient compensation, and provide due process when farmers’ land is taken.
Each of these basic legal protections would further secure and clarify farmer’s land rights. That helps ensure that farmers aren’t dissuaded from making long-term investments in their land by the constant threat of bulldozers. These investments can boost harvests and income and agricultural development and help close the country’s worrisome urban-rural income gap, promoting stability and security.