Closing statement from workshop on culture, practice and law: women’s access to land in Rwanda. Contains recommendations on the marriage problem, the inheritance law, land scarcity and population growth, the land policy and the bill, the environment, discrimination.

Extracts from a farewell talk. Includes back to the land; engaging with Oxfam International in Zimbabwe; working on the Zambian Copperbelt; supporting post-tsunami, post-conflict land and property rights advocacy in Aceh, Indonesia; helping to create and sustain national land alliances and support awareness campaigns in Africa; women’s land rights in Southern and Eastern Africa; concluding thoughts, some publications.

Includes formal and customary land systems for property rights; legal and customary rights for women; formalization and documentation of land rights; women’s involvement in land transactions; governance and institutions; access to information about women’s land rights; recommendations.

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.

Contains recognise and strengthen customary rights starting with statutory recognition; community rather than individual titling must be further explored as an option; women’s land rights remain weak under customary tenure but formalization is not necessarily the answer; custom or rights for women is a false dichotomy; supporting women’s collective action is key; political leadership and evidence from research are needed to transform policies and practices; technical tools to secure land rights require wider policy and institutional support.

Covers introduction, farm workers in South Africa, tenure security for farm workers with a focus on ESTA – including the justice system, farmers’ responses and women farm workers; equity share schemes; rural housing and land redistribution; lessons to and from South Africa.

Includes assets, inequalities and the gender-asset gap; overview of the GAAP conceptual framework; gender, assets and agricultural development interventions; summary and implications. Discusses implications of gender differences for designing agricultural development interventions to increase asset growth. Identifies additional gaps in knowledge and possible investigations to address them.

Comprises background and research objectives, literature review, research methodology, research findings, conclusions and recommendations. Believes that local authorities should be sensitized to the urgent need to bring sustainable and just resolution to intra-household disputes as there is a tendency for these to result in violence against women disputants. Dispute resolution bodies may be more successful if they adopt mediation approaches and work with men to understand why gender equal land rights can serve their interests as well.

Includes methodology, literature review, legal analysis, experiences and rights to land of women in de facto unions in Rwanda, root causes of de facto unions, the costs of illegitimacy, recommendations for strengthening the rights of women in de facto unions. Until policy and law protect the rights of women in de facto unions and people accept women in de facto unions as legitimate wives and contributors to household prosperity, they will continue to be chased away by their husbands or families-in-law, and endure the resulting negative economic, health, and social consequences.