Land rights, gender equality and donor cooperation

Development cooperation has contributed to the integration of provisions for strengthening women’s land rights as part of the new wave of land reform which has swept across much of the developing world over the last couple of decades. However, words about land and gender are not enough.

This DIIS Report examines the role of development cooperation in land reforms and the extent to which donor organisations have addressed concerns related to gender equality.

The report reviews the reforms in fifteen countries in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America and Asia, with a focus on Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Nicaragua.

Donor organisations have played an important role in land law reforms but also in related legal reforms such as succession law or marriage law, which have an important impact on women’s access to and ownership of land. Legislation upholding gender equality is now present, albeit in different degrees, in most of the countries examined. However, the implementation of these legislative frameworks often does not follow suit, and women still face discrimination, in part due to social and cultural barriers and the inaccessibility of institutions able to support them.

Unfortunately, there are also signs that gender concerns are also increasingly ‘evaporating’ in development cooperation policies. Only limited funding is allocated to gender issues outside the ‘soft’ sectors of health and education and the implementation of gender mainstreaming in policies is generally weak. Finally, the continued inadequacy of gender-disaggregated data both in development cooperation and in national statistics e.g. on issues related to land tenure, significantly hampers efforts to effectively address issues related to gender equality and should therefore be corrected.