Over 94 % of Nepalese migrant workers are male youth who leave their female counterparts behind to manage agriculture alongside their traditional domestic chores. Changing agrarian and labour landscapes shape food security, livelihood choices and the wellbeing of those who continue to engage in local small-scale agriculture. The study aims to understand the interactions between household livelihoods, food security and the wellbeing of left-behind women and lower-caste farmers. It includes a literature review, and draws results from 69 in-depth interviews with women farmers.

This report presents a preliminary synthesis of existing findings emerging from IDRC-supported projects on large-scale land acquisitions and accountability in Africa. Two-thirds of foreign land deals take place in developing countries with serious hunger problems and in countries with the weakest land rights protection laws. Investments to date have served to highlight existing weaknesses in the management and governance of agricultural lands and local communities.

The study illustrates that small holders, particularly women, are increasingly losing farmland. It questions the social development impact of large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) in Cameroon in terms of better living standards and reduction of poverty. It also examines how and under what conditions women can be empowered to effectively engage with LSLAs to ensure that legal and policy frameworks foster better accountability and legitimacy in land governance. Most untitled land in Cameroon is now national land held under customary tenancy, without security.

Drawing on insights from multiple studies, this policy brief addresses the importance of gender considerations for small-scale livestock farming communities relative to food security in the South African context. The brief examines some key elements of gender issues in relation to small-scale livestock farming, asks how some of these elements align with current policies and practices, and suggests a number of focused policy recommendations. Two thirds of the world’s 600 million poor livestock keepers are rural women.

This chapter uses both classic and contemporary literature to trace how land policies, and particularly land reform, have gained, lost, and regained prominence in development strategies and debates since the Second World War. It introduces contemporary issues and debates on gender and generational issues in land policy and land grabbing involving sometimes spectacularly large corporate land deals, and concluding with reflections on new ideas of food and land sovereignty that drive today’s agrarian movements.

Land distribution is highly skewed in Africa, where women’s ownership of land is a small percentage of that owned by men. Women frequently lack the resources to acquire land in their own right and are further disadvantaged by discriminatory inheritance laws, customary practices and market structures. This report summarizes presentations at the symposium on women’s rights and access to land.

Grassroots organizations do not need to wait for the state to implement Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (Tenure Guidelines or TGs). Rural communities can take governance into their own hands and use TGs as a tool for investigation, reflection and action. The challenge is how to take the next step: under what conditions can TGs provide the rural poor with resources to organize and mobilize?

The paper critically engages with sustainable development goal targets (SDG-2- Target 2.3; SDG-5) to examine how and why large-scale agricultural land acquisitions modify the social relations of women’s food access. The study draws from impacts of various plantation schemes in Cameroon and Ghana. It argues that the framing of the SDG-2 appears to co-exist alongside promotion of corporate-led agricultural investment.