Some commercial farmers in Serenje District, Central Province of Zambia, have acquired thousands of hectares while ignoring laws meant to prevent forced evictions. Some have used bulldozers to forcibly evict residents whose families have farmed the land for generations. This has been devastating for the communities and particularly hard on women.

ROAPE’s Janet Bujra questions Marjorie Mbilinyi about her fifty years of campaigning against patriarchal oppression on many fronts in Tanzania. Mbilinyi traces the legitimisation of feminism as a means to understand and a way to organise for and with women. This is not a feminism lifted from Europe or the US, but one generated in response to Tanzanian and African realities.

Paper discusses Zambia’s dual land tenure system, the ways in which gender issues have been incorporated in legal and policy documents, and the extent to which this has been reflected in practice. It also examines the role of donors in legal and policy processes and donor support to civil society in relation to women’s land rights. Gender and land policies provide for the allocation of land to women, but have little impact on the ground. Customary law is on the whole discriminatory against women, in particular with regard to land ownership.

Contains introduction; determinants of property rights and consequences of loss (including country examples from Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Namibia, Zambia); policy context: influencing strategies to promote property and housing rights; finding what works: mapping good practice in local and national activities (including legislative frameworks, judicial capacity and litigation, public awareness); lessons and suggested next steps; conclusion; appendices; references.

In 1999 Ghana engaged in an ambitious land reform process with the adoption of a National Land Policy implemented through a Land Administration Project. The reform aims at strengthening land administration institutions and increasing the security of land tenure for landholders on both customary and state land, but the process is facing multiple challenges, e.g.

Examines the role of development cooperation in land reforms and the extent to which donor organisations have addressed concerns related to gender equality. Reviews the reforms in 15 countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia, with a focus on Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Nicaragua. Legislation upholding gender equality is now present in different degrees in most of the countries examined. However, implementation 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.

Having listened to the presentations, encourage communities to continue to assert their rights. Noted a failure of governance and lack of good democratic practice. Consultation processes have been abused, promises not fulfilled, women not involved in decision making, there is a critical need for greater openness and transparency in all land deals. Make a number of recommendations to African governments and calls on investors to ensure that women’s voices and interests are heard and heeded in all decision making.

Highly condensed paper on gendered land rights, written principally for Oxfam staff and partners, and summarising some of the literature on Africa and elsewhere.

Paper written for Democracy, Land and Liberation in Africa Today: Bridging Past and Present Scholarship. A colloquium in honour of Lionel Cliffe held at the University of Cape Town. Includes the academic world, 1960-84 (universities in Southern Africa, my academic writing); the NGO world, 1987-2007 (Oxfam’s Southern Africa Desk, women’s land rights, working with Zimbabwean researchers, land and property rights in post-tsunami Aceh; the consultancy world (Zimbabwe 1999, South Africa 2000 DLA, South Africa 2001 the LRC); an academic again in retirement?

Brief summary of 4 presentations at the Mokoro land seminar by Martin Adams (Mokoro) on FAO’s support for tenure, rights and access to land and natural resources: lessons from Mozambique; by Joseph Hanlon (LSE) on The Mozambique land grab myth; by Elizabeth Daley (Mokoro) on Current issues around gender and land; and by Joss Saunders (Oxfam) on Engaging in strategic litigation and working with lawyers on land, gender and access to justice.

Includes the challenges at different levels; some historical trends which have not helped women; some suggested ways forward; all very worthy, but hard to achieve; conclusions from the literature; fighting on the correct battlefield; pragmatic lessons from a book on Eastern Africa; will women lose even more as a result of the biofuel revolution?; women’s land rights in Rwanda.

An exciting new collection inspired by a 2003 Oxfam/FAO workshop in Pretoria. Foreword briefly looks at the struggle for women’s land rights across the globe and the lack of concrete gains. Women have been confronted by resistance and patriarchy. Many land reform programmes over the past 60 years were falsely premised on notions of a unitary household. Women were disadvantaged by the codification of customary law in colonial Africa and are now by privatization in a context exacerbated by the coming of HIV and AIDS, which is breaking down notions of reciprocity.