‘We train women on land literacy … good laws relating to gender equality in land ownership are not enough’

Access to land is a key women’s empowerment issue, given its transformative impact. Landesa has been working in multiple countries, including India, to secure land rights for women. Karol Boudreaux, Landesa chief programme officer, spoke with Rudroneel Ghosh on the sidelines of the 2019 Women Deliver Conference about transnational experiences, successes and challenges in ensuring women’s right to land:

What is Landesa doing currently in India?

We have been in India for several years and currently we have a project in West Bengal where we work closely with the state government, particularly on the rural livelihood mission there to train women on land literacy. Also, we have started a new programme to work with women’s self-help group (SHG) to provide them with skills that they could use to collect information to update land records in their villages. So we will work with the government to select SHG members who are interested in working as data collectors within their villages. They will go to each household and talk to them about whether they have updated mutations, whether land records reflect current realities, etc.

We are hoping to convince the government to give them a small fee so that the SHG women members earn a small income and simultaneously help the government achieve its goal of updating land records. So we will be training these women on land laws, the process of land records, updation and understanding tablet technologies, which we assume will be portable and help bridge the digital divide in other areas.

What kind of impact have your activities had on the local population in Bengal?

We have trained around 5,00,000 women on land literacy over the last couple of years. We always work through government policies and schemes so that we can have impact of scale. Apart from training and educating women on land laws, we also talk to them about inheritance rights, helping them understand why securing rights over a parcel of land, whether it is homestead land or agricultural land, is so important for them and their families.

What has been your experience working in China?

My colleagues in China have been working with many of the same Chinese officials over the course of three decades with the goal of encouraging the Chinese government to recognise the land rights of rural women and men who are producing the food crops for all the people who are moving to the cities. And just this past year we have seen some of our recommendations to the rural contracting law being adopted whereby rural women farmers got more recognition and more than 200 million rural families benefited from more secured rights to land.

So the whole transition away from collective ownership to recognising family units as holders of land with long-term lease holder rights is something that we have been involved with, and we continue to work with the government to think through their compulsory acquisition law so that people whose lands are taken for government projects are fairly compensated.

And third, we are looking at rural residential land and working with the government to provide more legal security for those assets. By some estimates that is a trillion-dollar property market, so if one can secure it, it will really empower the rural people in China, some of whom may not want to stay in the rural areas if they have rights to sell their rural residential assets.

How do you account for increasing fragmentation of land in your bid to empower women through land in India?

We are trying to support efforts for women to collectively farm lands. So we are looking at some of the leasehold laws in different states because we think it might be empowering for women to join together collectively and overcome some of the fragmentation problem and consolidate land holdings into cooperatives or other kinds of SHG units. This will help them take advantage of educational opportunities, exposure to extension services, access to better inputs in agriculture and essentially work together to grow their agriculture businesses and become agro-preneurs. With so many men leaving rural areas and so many women staying behind, there could be important livelihood opportunities for women if they can group together, benefit from economies of scale, and use the land productively.

How do you address situations where women legally own the land but aren’t able to benefit from it?

This problem is there across the world. Many countries have good laws relating to gender equality in land ownership but in practice many women are unable to exercise their right over land. This is a huge issue. So changing laws and policies isn’t enough. We have to go a step further and change mindsets and behaviour, and give women the skills they need to claim and benefit from the rights they have over land. This is social behaviour change work and it is critically important to work with men.