Land technology is moving at warp speed. How will the Biden administration and Samantha Power ensure women benefit?

Since last year, 35,000 people in Uganda’s Kiryandongo district were forced from their lands to make way for large-scale farming, including at gunpoint and by a sugar firm with international backing.

Por Marcos Candido 

A agricultora Maria Josefa costuma dizer que mora "no meio do mato", rodeada por um pomar colorido pelos tons alaranjados dos pés de acerola e cacau cultivadas por ela na comunidade Tancredo Neves, em São Félix do Xingu, no Pará. Lá a telefonia não chega, e até 2017 não havia nem energia elétrica. Porém isso não impediu Josefa de se tornar tesoureira e presidente interina de um projeto que mantém a cor e a vida do meio ambiente: a agricultura familiar.

This blog is a summary of a paper that assesses the effectiveness of a specific land tenure intervention to improve the lives of women, by asking new questions of available project data sets.

Local communities manage a significant portion of the world’s remaining forests, pastures, and fisheries as common property resources, but they are rarely recognized as formal owners. Important progress has occurred during the last twenty years, as growing evidence suggests that devolving rights to communities can provide incentives for new forms of investment that facilitate sustainable outcomes as well as greater equity in the distribution of benefits.

Considering that land tenure security is crucial to better outcomes for women it is a surprise that there is not more evidence out there on what works to achieve it.

Over the past year, during my work in western Uganda, I have had the opportunity to get to know Paolyel Onencan. Paolyel is the Executive Director of Buliisa Initiative for Rural Development Organisation (BIRUDO). Paolyel and his BIRUDO colleagues are doing good work around Uganda’s oil and gas development in the Albertine Graben, by helping families get better deals on compensation from the oil companies (Total and China National Offshore Oil Company) working in the region.

For the past six months, Resource Equity has been working with our partner Associates Research Trust to implement our Starting With Women approach with subsistence mining associations in Karamoja, Uganda. 

I recently traveled to the highlands of Peru. Every woman I met there seemed to be doing something with wool: spinning it, or knitting or crocheting skirts, sweaters, and scarves. I was fascinated by the activity, as a sometimes knitter myself, but when I asked to take pictures of them they reacted with confusion at my interest. In their minds, they were not doing anything remarkable or picture worthy, just the daily work they needed to get done.