I write this blog as our project team embarks on a fifth year of work on women’s land tenure security (WOLTS) with pastoral communities in mining-affected areas of Mongolia and Tanzania. Just before Christmas 2019, we were in Mundarara village in northern Tanzania. Exceptionally heavy rains made getting around much more challenging than usual. Locals travelling on foot had to make wide detours to avoid getting bogged down in waterlogged grazing land, and it took everyone much longer to get to the village primary school for our long-planned training day. 

Matito Leruso was born and raised in the herding community of Lengurma in Isiolo County. Communal grazing land has been central to her community’s livelihood, wellbeing, and identity for generations, but they have never had their legal rights to govern it recognized. None of Kenya’s thousands of pastoralist communities have. This changed in 2016, with the passage of the Community Land Act. Since then, Matito has joined other residents of Lengurma in working to understand, use and shape the new law to ensure that their community land rights are respected and upheld.

1. Participation and sectoriality in development

Local communities manage a significant portion of the world’s remaining forests, pastures, and fisheries as common property resources, but they are rarely recognized as formal owners. Important progress has occurred during the last twenty years, as growing evidence suggests that devolving rights to communities can provide incentives for new forms of investment that facilitate sustainable outcomes as well as greater equity in the distribution of benefits.

Over the last 2 years, a bottom-up SDGs monitoring process has been developing in the municipalities of Caruaru and Bonito to give women tenure security. 

Caruaru and Bonito are located in the semi-arid region of Pernambuco state in northeast Brazil, where grassroots women have been supported by Espaço Feminista,a civil society organization dedicated to women’s economic and political empowerment through public policies. 

By Nadra Rahman 

By Deborah Espinosa and Patrick Gallagher, USAID’s Land Technology Solutions Program

Persistent and pervasive gender inequality is a global development challenge that constrains economic growth, educational opportunities, and health outcomes. It jeopardizes food security and undermines poverty reduction strategies. The world over, some formal and many informal laws and customs operate to hinder women’s empowerment and thus their full potential as agents of economic and social change.

A data story from women in a semiarid region of Brazil

*This story was written by the following women: Ducicleide Maria da Silva, Gigliola Silva Araújo, Ianka Sayonara da Silva, Josefa Ferreira da Silva, Maria do Carmo da Conceição Carvalho, Maria Karoline Policarpo Silva, Manuella Donato, Mariana de Albuquerque Vilarim and Thalya Carla Vieira de Lima and Patricia Maria Chaves .  It was translated by Sonia Jay Wright.*  

Rural women demand for accountability on land rights in Africa as we celebrate the second anniversary of the Kilimanjaro Initiative.

On December 11 2018, at the sidelines of the second ordinary session of the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS) Parliament, a parliamentary network on gender equality in land, agricultural investments and food security was launched.

The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) launched an Alumni Profile Series in which alumni of CCSI’s Executive Training on Sustainable Investments in Agriculture are interviewed about their career paths.

Deciding whether or not to allow an investor to use community lands and natural resources is one of the most important decisions a community can make. Namati and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) have published two new guides to help communities prepare for interactions with investors and, if they so wish, negotiate fair, equitable contracts. These guides are the first of their kind.