Using household- and plot-level data from Ghana, analyzes the main factors associated with farmers’ perceived tenure security. Individually, farmers perceive greater tenure security on plots acquired via inheritance than on land allocated by traditional authorities. But collectively, perceived tenure security lessens in communities with more active land markets and economic vibrancy. Migrant households and women in polygamous households feel less secure about their tenure, while farmers with political connections are more confident about their tenure security.

Emphasises the need for donors, NGOs and governments to take a more comprehensive approach to women’s land rights that addresses underlying gender dynamics to bring about transformative gender change rather than token gains for women. To be effective, work to secure women’s rights to land must focus on tackling social relations to transform gender dynamics and needs to start at household level.

Improving women’s ability to securely access land is recognized as an effective means to increase gender equality and advance other key social and economic development goals. Despite progressive laws in many African countries, gender disparities commonly persist in women’s access and ownership of land. Although legal empowerment of women can help to strengthen their claims to land, governments commonly lack the capacity to offer legal services.

Explores how global standards and guidelines contribute to gender equality and women’s empowerment, and whether more can be done through these instruments to improve the situation of women in agriculture. Includes lessons from the field.

Includes background; conceptual framework; methodology; research findings – security of tenure, cultural practices, gender inequalities, land utilisation, constraints to production, a passion for farming, gender bias against women farmers in access to and utilization of land; lessons learnt, recommendations.

Comprises notes from an informal meeting in Pretoria addressing the impasse on land reform in Southern Africa. The main focus is on overcoming problems and constraints, including on redistribution, tenure reform, the land rights of women, HIV/AIDS and donor support. Has sections on the viability of small-scale farms, post-transfer support, mobilising support for land reform, and proposed follow up. There are two main appendices; one on the status of land reform in each of the countries in the region, the other a matrix of current land issues in each country.

Over the last two decades, 200 million people across the world have been lifted out of hunger. But as climate change brings more frequent and severe weather shocks such as droughts and floods, and makes rainfall patterns less predictable, these gains are under threat, especially among Africa’s smallholder farmers. Agriculture is Africa’s biggest employer. But mean temperatures are expected to rise faster in the continent than the global average, decreasing crop yields and deepening poverty.

Argues that the debate over land reform in Africa is embedded in evolutionary models, in which it is assumed that landholding systems are evolving into individualised systems of ownership with greater market integration. This process is seen to be occurring even without state protection of private land rights through titling. Gender as an analytical category is excluded in evolutionary models. Women are accommodated only in their dependent position as the wives of landholders in idealised ’households’.

Includes land reform: perpetuating patriarchal land policies?; Fast Track Land Reform: decentralisation or recentralisation?; women’s access to land in the land reform process; constraints faced by women in accessing land; who is pushing the agenda for better access to and utilisation of land for women?; conclusion: women beneficiaries of land reform; recommendations.

Contains chapters on formalisation of land rights; women’s land rights – a human rights-based approach; a market-based approach to land rights, followed by country studies on Tanzania, Mozambique, South Africa, Zimbabwe and Kenya.

Research findings include: land rights in marriage and during cohabitation; daughters and inheritance rights; land disputes; land administration and registration; education and monitoring implementation of the Land Law.

Paper introduces the rationale for focusing on women’s land rights and explains the Learning Route methodology and the preparation of this Route in particular, before providing background information on land tenure and women’s land rights in Rwanda and Burundi.