Land Ownership and Forest Access for Women Remain Vulnerable Across Developing Regions Worldwide

The Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) has published a new report that analyses legal frameworks in 35 countries across various regions, including Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The report is a follow-up to a study conducted by RRI in 2017 that looked at the rights of women in 30 countries across the Global South.

The review examined community women's rights of access to resources, exclusion of third parties, due process, compensation, management, voting, dispute resolution, and community-level inheritance. However, the report states that not a single goal around gender equality is on track to be met, including the goal to ensure equal rights for land ownership.

The analysis found that just 2% of legal frameworks provide adequate protection for voting rights, 5% for community leadership structures, and 13% for the right to inheritance. The report also found that only 11 countries guarantee women the right to inherit property when someone dies without a will.

Chloe Ginsburg, the associate director of the tenure-track program at RRI, stated that when community women have secure rights to their lands and resources, they are better positioned to advance the sustainability and conservation objectives of their communities. She also highlighted that codifying the rights of women can strengthen food security and improve livelihoods for entire families and communities.

However, the report notes that despite new laws, most laws follow a "gender-blind" approach that fails to explicitly protect women, and some newer laws provide fewer protections for women than previous ones. This observation is backed by the fact that the report found little progress in securing women's rights to forests in Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities since RRI's 2017 assessment.

To update the findings, RRI collaborated with consultants to review over 800 laws, more than a quarter of which were either enacted or reformed since the original study. Despite these efforts, the current study by the Rights and Resources Initiative does not appear in the provided search results, so specific information about which of the 35 studied countries have laws explicitly protecting women's rights to forest ownership and management is not available.

The report was published five years before the 2030 target date for the United Nations sustainable development goals, making it a timely reminder of the urgent need to address gender inequality in land rights. The report can be accessed with permission from Mongabay.com.

Land Ownership and Forest Access for Women Remain Vulnerable Across Developing Regions Worldwide