High-level meeting at UN headquarters to focus on women's right to land

Recent years have seen growing attention to women's access to and control over productive resources such as land, and the crucial role such access and control plays in increasing agricultural productivity, food security, economic growth and social welfare. According to the UN Women report, Progress of the World's Women, 115 countries specifically recognize women’s property rights on equal terms with men. But in many parts of the world, there are still significant barriers preventing women from actually enjoying and exercising these rights. These barriers often relate to entrenched cultural practices, differences between formal legal systems and customary or traditional systems, a lack of awareness of existing laws and precedents, limited access to courts and limited resources.

In this context, the governments of Finland and Ethiopia, in conjunction with UN Women, have organized a meeting at UN headquarters, to be held on Tuesday 23 September 2014. The meeting, titled Women's Right to Land – the Development Impact, aims to analyze the benefits of greater equality in land ownership and tenure, and discuss the steps required to ensure women's rights to land – both in theory and in practice.

Meeting panelists will include H.E. Mr. Pekka Haavisto, Minister for International Development, Finland, H.E. Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, Minister for Foreign Affairs, Ethiopia, and Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka, Executive Director of UN Women. The discussion will be moderated by Caren Grown, World Bank Group Senior Director on Gender. FAO Deputy Director-General for Knowledge, Maria Helena Semedo will attend of behalf of FAO.

FAO's commitment, recent achievements and ongoing work

Ms Semedo will reaffirm FAO's commitment to this important issue; she will present specific recent achievements and ongoing work in this regard. In particular, the endorsement by the Committee on Food Security in 2012 of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests: gender equality is one of the ten core principals of the Guidelines, which make a specific call to governments to remove all legal inequalities that limit women’s access to land.

Even with legal frameworks in place, customs and traditions can continue to favour male ownership in land purchases and inheritance. At the start of a recent FAO-World Bank project on Land and Gender in the Western Balkans, participants claimed female land ownership wasn’t a concern because there were solid laws and legal frameworks in place to protect women’s rights. But when the project produced gender-disaggregated data throughout the region, policy-makers were astonished by the actual numbers, which ranged from 16-39 percent female ownership, with rural regions seeing rates as low as 3 percent.

Armed with their new data, country teams set about working to reverse the trend in pilot communities, bringing together policy makers, gender specialists, municipal authorities, notaries, farmers’ organizations and the media to encourage husbands to coregister their wives on property deeds, and exhort families to treat sons and daughters equally in property inheritance. A new documentary – launched today on the FAO, World Bank and UN Women web sites – highlights both the challenges faced by the project  and the progress already made in changing attitudes towards women's land ownership.

FAO's Gender and Land Rights Database is a key resource for up-to-date country level information on the major political, legal and cultural factors that influence the realisation of women’s land rights. A revised and revamped web site for the Database will be launched in November, and will include a legislation assessment tool along with new profiles and data.

Land-related agricultural investments

FAO's ongoing research on the gender and equity implications of land-related agricultural investments is also central to ensuring that women can participate in and benefit from private sector investment schemes. Representatives of the private sector, civil society, development partners, donors and academics recently came together for a conference co-organized by FAO, on Agricultural investment, gender and land in Africa: Towards inclusive equitable and socially responsible investment. The aim of the multi-stakeholder consultation was to build a common understanding of the importance of integrating gender into agricultural investment policies and programmes and to identify important criteria that need to be fulfilled so that business models, contractual arrangements and partnerships can foster inclusive and gender equitable agriculture investments.