13th March 2018: The EU is taking part in CSW62! Joint EU-Germany-Finland Side Event on "Transformative approaches to achieve women’s tenure security at scale: the relation between equal land rights and women’s empowerment in rural Africa"

Land rights are crucial for women’s social and economic empowerment, as well as for household food security, the fight against poverty and the growth of the rural economy. Despite this, women’s rights to access, use and control land are often restricted and/or denied due to diverse barriers present in women’s daily life. Particularly, some customary practices as well as gender-unequal legal frameworks often discriminate against women and/or do not provide enough protection for their rights. Moreover, often women do not enjoy the same educational and economic opportunities as men, and so are often excluded from decision-making processes regarding the use and management of land and other resources. 

To overcome these barriers, many countries have reformed their constitutions and national laws for guaranteeing women’s equal property and inheritance rights in order to ensure they are recognized and specific action on the ground is taken to protect, promote and fulfil these rights. Notwithstanding legal advancements, much more needs to be done to enforce these rules and to tackle the discriminatory practices and behaviour which prevent women from enjoying their land rights.

The EU's Gender Action Plan 2, 2016–20 (GAP II) stresses the critical importance of women's rights to land. This Action Plan provides the EU framework to promote gender equality and girls’ and women’s empowerment through external relations. In this plan, the importance of access to land is considered as pivotal both to promote the economic and social rights/empowerment of girls and women and to strengthen girls’ and women’s voices and participation.

In recognising the need for gender-sensitive land governance, most EU land projects address the respect of women’s land rights through, for example, promoting gender-balanced land legislation (e.g. Malawi), supporting the certification of women’s land rights (e.g. Malawi and Colombia), enhancing women’s participation in land decision-making processes (e.g. Malawi and Honduras) and improving their access to legal services and awareness-raising about their land rights (e.g. Zambia). 

The EU is also engaged at the global level in discusssions on how to scale up initiatives that aim to improve women's land tenure security and their empowerment. This topic will be discussed next week in New York during the 62nd Committee on the Status of Women (CSW62)  in a side-event on "Transformative approaches to achieve women’s tenure security at scale: the relation between equal land rights and women’s empowerment in rural Africa" jointly organized by the EU, Finland and Germany. 

The objective of this side event is to demonstrate how the goal of women’s empowerment, especially from an economic perspective, is closely connected to securing their access to land and how attainment of these rights and their enforcement in practice can be supported. It will serve as an opportunity to showcase successful examples of gender-transformative approaches from Africa that tackle the underlying norms and dynamics of inequality in the context of land tenure and share best practices from implementation.

If you are in New York on the 13th March, register here and join our discusssion! 

Please see below the flyer of the side-event. Other material from the panel will be shared on ROSA in the coming weeks so please come back to visit! 

Should you wish for more information on EU cooperation in support of women's land rights, contact Maria Ketting, DEVCO Unit C1 - Food Security, Nutrition and Rural Development (Maria.PARIS-KETTING@ec.europa.eu)