Research Programmes
Gender Relations and Land Access
The ways in which issues of gender inequalities have appeared in debates about the ongoing land tenure reforms in several countries of Sub-Saharan Africa underline the importance of continuing research and policy advocacy on securing women's interests. In countries such as Tanzania , Uganda and Ghana , the contestations have been about the nature of gender inequalities in land relations and their implications for women's tenure security. As well, there have been acrimonious discussions about which policies would protect the welfare of women and ensure that gender inequalities are not deepened, but instead are minimised or eliminated all together.
While gender inequalities have generally proved intractable, inequalities in the distribution of land and in land tenure arrangements pose particular conceptual and practical challenges which make it an even harder subject to tackle. Both within the research and advocacy communities in Africa , interest in gender and land tenure has tended to lag behind reforms. Advocacy activities have grown in momentum only in the latter stages of the reforms and have tended to stymied by the lack of research on many key issues and the lack of proper exploration of the sometimes formulaic recommendations.
The proposal for multi-country research project is to provide a framework for the discussion of the specificities and commonalities in land tenure issues in several Africa countries. It also would provide the opportunity to explore in more detail the issue of how best to secure women's land interests within the current context of market driven land tenure reforms. While the problems of women's land interests have local and national specificities and studies have stressed the importance of taking these specificities into account, there are important reasons why multi country studies, even if not strictly comparative, are useful.
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- Gender Relations and Land Reform,
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