Studies have shown that a key factor associated with rural poverty is access to land. Yet in many parts of India there remains a huge gender gap in land ownership and control - with significant implications for women's economic and social status.

An investigation of the potential gender implications of the shift from communal to more individualised forms of land tenure in the Bambara area of Mali.

Across Africa, land is integral to identity and existence. Access to, and ownership of land for women is often problematic – particularly when laws and culture collide. Land issues, including family property matters, are often determined within entrenched cultural norms, resulting in the application of a hybrid legal interpretation of both customary and national law that leaves many women at a disadvantage. Under the Commonwealth Plan of Action for Gender Equality 2005-2015, the Commonwealth Secretariat has spearheaded efforts to secure women’s rights to land in Africa.

In Africa, the pursuit of gender equality in inheritance rights remains one of the most difficult challenges due to its entrenched patriarchal characteristics. This is also the case in the rural communities of South-Eastern Nigeria. This article investigates gender discrimination in the region, among the Igbo ethnic group, with regard to land property rights; and makes policy recommendations to overcome the failures of past intervention efforts, many of which considered this problem as too culturally sensitive.

While the majority of women in Sub-Saharan Africa and particularly Eastern Africa provide a living for their families on land, they largely do not own it. This comprises one part of a study on women and land in five countries in Eastern Africa - and was commissioned by the Eastern African Sub-Regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI).

Previously in China, all land was controlled by the communes. Over the past twenty years, with the break up of the communes, new land tenure arrangements have given greater control over land to individual households. This essay argues that recent transfers in land tenure between households have caused women to lose rights and decision making power over land, as well as possibilities to benefit from land. Men's migration to cities has caused a 'feminisation' of agriculture which fuels a market for tenure transfer.

The biofuel boom has become a core issue in Zimbabwean land and development debates. Biofuels require large tracts of land for production; and the land acquisition programmes by the various state, non-state actors and individuals have been termed ‘land grabbing’. The increasing global demand for biofuels has different gender specific socio-economic and environmental effects in Zimbabwe. Males and females in the biofuel producing zone may face a differential risk matrix, comprising different issues.

Indigenous land tenure arrangements in South Africa have generally consisted of communal ownership. In this system, who benefited from the land depended on their status as family or clan head. The colonial regime dispossessed Africans of land in favour of European arrivals, or defined family property as ancestral property in which the senior males of the head family were taken as the owners with the rights to inherit. The post-apartheid government conceptualised acess to land for the previously disadvantaged as a human right.

The Women Advancement Trust (WAT) in Tanzania carries out various initiatives related to land rights, affordable housing, and inheritance rights. This report presents lessons learned from a housing and shelter development initiative. The goals of the initiative were to empower low-income communities, particularly women, to participate fully and actively in all aspects of human settlements development, including the improvement of their living and housing conditions.

How can the abstract principles of the human rights-based approach (HRBA) be translated into practical strategies to improve women's ownership and access to land? In Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe, and Kenya, despite changes in national law and policy aiming to improve women's land tenure, none of the land reforms meet human rights standards. This is because legal regulation of land blurs with customary laws mostly relating to land transactions and family, marriage or inheritance.

Women do 70 per cent of the agricultural work in Senegal, but according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), own only two percent of the land that may be cultivated. Although property laws in countries such as Senegal, Tunisia and Burkina Faso recognise women' s and men's equal rights, and Islam gives women the right to inherit half what men inherit, in practice men retain land ownership. Women are dependent on fathers or husbands for land.

Malawi is facing increasing land scarcity and food insecurity for its large rural population and is in the midst of an on-going land policy reform process. This report asks how these reforms may affect women's land rights in a situation of increasing scarcity and competition for land. Reforms include the formalisation of customary land rights as private land rights as a way to ensure tenure security and equitable access to land. It warns that through this approach, women's rights may become increasingly marginalised.