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Published on March 2016, this paper aims to deepen the understanding on women’s access to land and to analyse how adjustments in the legal framework regulating women’s land tenure can promote their economic empowerment and ultimately generate more productive agricultural systems. As underlined in the paper, “development practitioners recognize that secure land rights have a strong empowering effect on women: it reduces their reliance on male partners and relatives, increases their bargaining power within the household and improves their chances of accessing extension services and credit, of joining producer organizations and contributing to the promotion of more productive agricultural systems”.

National policy and legal frameworks provide a crucial foundation for the mainstreaming of gender equality. While law in itself cannot generate gender‐equitable land tenure, it provides an authoritative framework for its realization. Many governments are indeed pushing in the direction of amending and/or repealing existing discriminatory provisions in the legislation to improve gender-equitable access to land. It may be the case, however, that these policy recommendations remain unapplied due to a lack of guidance on how to effectively implement them.

In order to address this lack of knowledge on how to effectively implement gender sensitive legislation regulating access to land, this paper introduces a Legal Assessment Tool (LAT) which is designed to: (1) assess the extent to which the national legal framework of any given country fosters gender‐equitable land tenure; (2) identify the sources of gender differentiation in the legislation; and (3) help determine the appropriate course of action for reform.

The LAT was developed by the Gender and Land Rights Database (GLRD) of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and produced for the Social Policies and Rural Institutions Division (ESP) in collaboration with the Development Law Service (LEGN), to promote and support the implementation of the principle of gender equality of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT).