GLA Celebrates International Women's Day 2021
Global Land Alliance celebrates International Women’s Day 2021 and women’s rights to ownership and security of their land and natural resource rights. GLA strives to achieve sustainable prosperity for people and places; and gender equity is certainly a cornerstone of this work. Securing women’s land and property rights can increase agricultural productivity, incentivize the adoption of climate-resilient natural resource management and increase household spending on health and education. Conversely, when women face barriers to accessing, using or controlling land and other productive resources around the world, it not only puts them on an unequal footing in life, but it also restricts these wider positive social, economic and environmental outcomes. Over the past year, we have been working on several initiatives to address the gender disparity in land:
In Colombia under the Land for Prosperity Activity, GLA has been working to operationalize strategies to apply gender equality, female empowerment and social inclusion (GESI) within a COVID-19 context, as well strategies to promote cultural change regarding the Care Economy (Economía del Cuidado). The team delved into COVID-safe approaches for the strategic and deliberate inclusion of women, youth and older adults. We examined the potential risks of exclusion and barriers to participation that these three populations may face during the Barrido Predial Masivo and provided solutions to help reduce the risks and remove the barriers. We are looking forward to continuing this work this year.
GLA has been working on a study alongside Resource Equity International to look at opportunities to better strengthen womens rights in collective tenure arrangements across 18 Forest Carbon Partnership Facility carbon fund countries. This work is happening in tandem to a more general study with Rights and Resources Initiative and the World Bank on opportunities to strengthen collective tenure rights, including the inclusion and rights of women.
Prindex launched unprecedented global comparative data last summer, including a special report on women’s perceptions of their property and tenure security. Despite the importance of securing women’s rights to land and property, much of the research on the topic has focused only on a handful of countries, especially those where large-scale land projects are underway. To fill this gap, the Prindex initiative released comparative data in 2019 on how women feel about their land and property rights in 33 countries. Since then, Prindex has expanded its efforts to include a further 107 countries – giving us the first truly global dataset of the perceptions of over 90,000 women and 78,400 men on tenure security in 140 countries worldwide. This report draws on the full 140-country dataset to analyze land and tenure insecurity through a gender lens. Read the full report here.