Tag: legal rights

The following summary provides contextual examples from across six country projects of how Gender Transformative Approaches (GTAs) have been designed in various contexts to strengthen women’s tenure and resource rights. These examples are drawn from projects implemented under the International Fund for Agricultural Development’s (IFAD) Global Initiative for Gender Transformative Approaches for Securing Women’s Resource Rights (WRR).

The purpose of the Facilitation Guide: Legal Empowerment Clinics for Women’s Resource Rights in Uganda is to advance the equitable recognition and enjoyment of land and resource rights (general and gender-specific) as well as enhance benefit sharing within the context of the NOPP and other IFAD- funded projects. The guide is conceived as a set of learning modules to be integrated into NOPP and MLHUD programming for civic education, gender, equity and social inclusion (GESI), and rural development.

This collection of tools include GTAs already developed and applied by IFAD projects and partners across targeted countries, as well as a suite of new tools to integrate women’s land rights more explicitly and support gender transformative outcomes. These tools entail different strategies to address inequalities at the individual, household, community, policy and institutional domains, as well as to catalyse and transform harmful and discriminatory norms, perceptions and attitudes, and behaviours and practices at the identified levels across targeted countries.

Co-creation is a collaborative process for generating shared visions, knowledge and strategies that lead to action. Co-creating actionresearch pilots with intended service users or programme partners is a more responsive approach to developing interventions. Apart from being more strategic (as it is more likely to be effective and/or sustained), it is also fundamentally the right of the groups targeted by interventions to have their preferences and perspectives heard and integrated.

The Guide contains four training modules, information for facilitators and training organizers, to be used as a tool for capacity building during training events. It targets a broad group of stakeholders, such as local authorities, government representatives, community members and elders, women’s groups, religious leaders, and other relevant actors involved in advancing women’s property and land rights. This Guide is not only for women’s empowerment and improved participation and representation in decisionmaking but also for the social and economic development of communities.

This toolbox was developed under the Women’s Resource Rights initiative funded by IFAD. The three-year initiative (2021-2024) conducted gender analyses, piloted context-appropriate GTAs to advance the recognition and protection of women’s land rights in different IFAD projects, and scaled up the GTA agenda. The initiative team collaborated with IFAD project personnel in each country to share insights, add value, and learn from ongoing efforts. Appropriate and relevant approaches were identified for scaling women’s land rights initiatives. Each IFAD project was unique, entailing different phases and timelines of project implementation, approaches to addressing gender, and issues concerning rights to land and resources. The initiative worked across diverse projects and contexts to harvest lessons and promote cross-learning.

The Reach, Benefit, Empower framework has been invaluable in guiding gender considerations in programming, ensuring that projects carefully consider their goals, and then move from ambition to implementation to evaluation. The framework makes it easier to see how projects claiming to “empower” women may only manage to “reach” them, such as through training, without actually verifying if the activities benefit or empower them. The addition of “Transform” to this framework (RBET for short) emphasizes the need for deeper structural or normative changes to create more equitable systems. In this brief we explore how to get the most out of the RBET framing in relation to securing women’s land and other resource rights.

In 2020, the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) invited a consortium of the Center for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry Centre (CIFOR-ICRAF), the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) to work with selected IFAD projects to promote and strengthen women’s land rights through the integration of gender transformative approaches (GTAs) in rural development interventions by improving policies, tools and practices. The Char Development and Settlement Project (CDSP) in Bangladesh was selected as one of these projects. After a gender analysis in the project area and co-creation workshop with CDSP, the following toolkit was originally designed for four IFAD-funded projects in Bangladesh.

The Agricultural Khas Land Management and Settlement Policy – 1997 is noted for its support and advancement of women’s land rights. However, an amendment to Article 6.0 (Jha) of this policy published in July 2022 risks undermining the progress that has been made. Notably, the Char Development and Settlement Programme (CDSP) has almost 20 years of activities towards securing women’s ownership, control, and access of productive lands.

This toolbox was developed under the Women’s Resource Rights initiative funded by IFAD. The three-year initiative (2021-2024) conducted gender analyses, piloted context-appropriate GTAs to advance the recognition and protection of women’s land rights in different IFAD projects, and scaled up the GTA agenda. The initiative team collaborated with IFAD project personnel in each country to share insights, add value, and learn from ongoing efforts. Appropriate and relevant approaches were identified for scaling women’s land rights initiatives. Each IFAD project was unique, entailing different phases and timelines of project implementation, approaches to addressing gender, and issues concerning rights to land and resources. The initiative worked across diverse projects and contexts to harvest lessons and promote cross-learning.