A woman planting a shea tree in Ghana to protect riverbanks, and for her economic empowerment. Much still remains to be done to overcome the difficulties women – particularly rural women – face in terms of mobility and political participation. Credit: ©IFAD/Dela Sipitey

By Valentina Gasbarri
ROME, Mar 14 2015 (IPS)

Rural women make major contributions to rural economies by producing and processing food, feeding and caring for families, generating income and contributing to the overall well-being of their households – but, in many countries, they face discrimination in access to agricultural assets, education, healthcare and employment, among others, preventing them from fully enjoying their basic rights.

Gender equality is now widely recognised as an essential component for sustainable development goals in the post-2015 agenda, with empowerment of rural women vital to enabling poor people to improve their livelihoods and overcome poverty.“To improve women’s social and economic status, we need more recognition for the vital role they play in the rural economy. Let us all work together to empower women to achieve food and nutrition security – for their sake, and the sake of their families and communities” – IFAD President Kanayo F. Nwanze

This year’s International Women’s Day, celebrated worldwide on Mar. 8, marked the 20th anniversary of the landmark Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing (1995), which called on governments, the international community and civil society from all over the world to empower women and girls by taking action in 12 critical areas: poverty, education and training, health, violence, armed conflict, the economy, power and decision-making, institutional mechanisms for the advancement of women, human rights, the media, the environment and the girl child.

Despite that call, much still remains to be done to overcome the difficulties women – particularly rural women – face in terms of mobility and political participation.

“Too often, rural women are doing the backbreaking work,” Kanayo F. Nwanze, President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), said on the occasion. “To improve women’s social and economic status, we need more recognition for the vital role they play in the rural economy. Let us all work together to empower women to achieve food and nutrition security – for their sake, and the sake of their families and communities.”

This year, the three Rome-based U.N. agencies – the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), World Food Programme (WFP) and IFAD – along with journalists and students from Rome’s LUISS, John Cabot and La Sapienza universities met to share testimonials of innovative interventions aimed at empowering rural women in four key areas: nutrition, community mobilisation, livestock and land rights.

A large body of research indicates that putting more income into the hands of women translates into improved child nutrition health and education in all developing regions of the world.

Explaining why women and men need to be involved together to move forward on nutrition, Britta Schumacher, a WFP Programme Policy Officer, described how the Renewed Efforts Against Child Hunger and Undernutrition (REACH) programme had been able to tackle malnutrition and health problems using an approach based on positive gender-oriented objectives.

The REACH programme – a joint initiative of FAO, the U.N. Children’s Fund (UNICEF), WFP and the World Health Organisation (WHO) – is based on the human right to nutrition security and seeks to transform the way governments and donors approach investment in nutrition to leverage existing investments most effectively and systematically identify priorities for additional investments needed to scale up.

Noting that “the long girls stay at school, the better is their health” because “lack of awareness represents a concrete obstacle to good practices,” Schumacher said that in Bangladesh activities had been carried out under the REACH programme to transfer knowledge within and between members of communities and local authorities, boost rural women’s access to services and strengthen their self-esteem. 

Stressing the need for community mobilisation, Andrea Sanchez Enciso, Gender and Participatory Communication Specialist with FAO, illustrated one of the achievements of FAO’s Dimitra project, a participatory information and communication project which contributes to improving the visibility of rural populations, women in particular.

In Niger, she said, “the Dimitra project encouraged the inclusion of a gender perspective in communication for development initiatives in rural areas … taking greater account of the specificities, needs and aspirations of men and women” and “creating participatory spaces for discussion between men and women, access to information and collective actions in their communities.”

Leading a two-year small livestock project in Afghanistan during the Taliban period, Antonio Riota, Lead Technical Specialist in IFAD’s Livestock, Policy and Technical Advisory Division, said that the project was developed and implemented in a context in which 90 percent of village chickens were managed by women and poultry was the only source of income for the entire community.

According to Riota, the project showed how small livestock can make a difference in rural women’s lives because one of its major results has been that “now women can walk all together” whereas previously they were accused of prostitution if they did so. “Some 75,000 women benefitted from the project and profitability increased by 91 percent,” he added.

Meanwhile, Mino Ramaroson, Africa Regional Coordinator at the International Land Coalition, described two African experiences of women’s networks – the National Federation of Rural Women in Madagascar and the Kilimanjaro Initiative – advocating for their rights to land and natural resources.

In Madagascar, the National Federation of Rural Women, which aims to promote rural women’s rights, improve members’ livelihoods and increase their resilience to external and internal shocks, has been joined by more than 450 rural women’s groups from the country’s six provinces.

The Kilimanjaro Initiative, initiated by rural women in 2012 and supported by the International Land Coalition, uses women’s rights to land and productive resources as an entry point for the mobilisation of rural women from across Africa to define the future they want, claim lives of dignity they deserve and identify and overcome the challenges that hold them back.

Edited by Phil Harris   

The land by Boegbor, a town in district four in Grand Bassa County, Liberia has been leased by the government to Equatorial Palm Oil for 50 years. Credit: Wade C.L. Williams/IPS

By Stephen Leahy
UXBRIDGE, Canada, Jun 10 2013 (IPS)

Africa is the main target for “land grabs” by foreign investors, according to a new report on large-scale land acquisitions around the world released Monday.

“Africa is the place for cheap land deals and most investors are from Western countries like the U.S. and UK,” said Michael Taylor of the International Land Coalition (ILC).“Investors are looking for annual returns of 20 and 25 percent and many are getting it." -- ILC's Michael Taylor

Globally some 45 million hectares of land has been or is about to be signed over to foreign investors in Africa, Southern Asia and Latin America. That’s equivalent to 60 percent of Europe’s farmland.

About half of this land is for food production and half for biofuels, according to data compiled by the ILC, a global alliance of nearly 100 civil society and intergovernmental organisations, including the World Bank and United Nations Environment Program.

“Some investors aren’t actually farming and are only interested in land speculation,” Taylor told IPS.

Rural communities are being displaced from their agricultural, grazing, forests and traditional lands by international investors, Teresa Anderson of the Gaia Foundation, the UK partner of the African Biodiversity Network, told IPS.

Most of the food-producing lands in Africa are held in common by local communities. In Asia and South America, hundreds of millions of small landholders, pastoralists and indigenous people do not hold formal land titles. And when it suits governments, they ignore this customary land holding and sell or lease the land to private companies.

Private capital from pension funds and investment firms are chasing food-producing land since they see it as the next big profitable commodity.

“Investors are looking for annual returns of 20 and 25 percent and many are getting it,” said Taylor.

Experts at the University of Georgia recently completed an assessment of 34 land acquisitions in Africa and concluded that in most cases local people lost “their land and livelihoods often in the absence of any real benefits”.

The U.S., Malaysia, United Arab Emirates and the UK are top foreign investors not only in Africa but in other countries, according to the ILC’s new Land Matrix Global Observatory. The Land Matrix is a website that provides the locations and details of nearly 1,000 land transactions all over the world.

The largest transnational land deals are in South Sudan and Papua New Guinea. The Land Matrix lists the individual land deals including the companies involved, the size of the acquisition and intended use. In Papua New Guinea, many of the land deals appear to be for palm oil production.

It is very difficult to track and detail land deals around the world and the ILC hopes that people will provide feedback and offer information, said Taylor.

“There is a huge number of land purchases going on that are not reflected in the Land Matrix,” he said.

Most of those are internal land purchases or leasing by elites within countries. Those are very difficult to document, he said.

“In the last three years, the government has sold more than 50,000 hectares of our land to companies,” said Lalji Desai, a Maldhari, a traditional shepherd in the state of Gujarat in India.

This is part of the state government’s plans for “development” but Maldhari and local farmers want to stay in agriculture. “The land is very fertile, we don’t want to give it up,” Desai told IPS from Ahmedabad, Gujarat.

Up to 70 villages with 125,000 people now find themselves living in “special investment regions” and their lands are being parcelled out to foreign companies like Suzuki and Hitachi, he said.

“These are not well-educated people. They won’t get jobs working for those companies,” he said.

Most companies are getting far more land than they need and are making money off reselling the land. “Land prices have increased 20 times in last 10 years. Everyone wants to buy land, including powerful politicians,” Desai said.

Local people want to stay on their land and are working to strengthen their movement and get more public attention. “We want people to know the best use of our land is for food production,” he said.

This is the kind of situation that the ILC hopes to make public through the Land Matrix website.

The hope is that the Land Matrix becomes an important tool to address the lack of transparency that still surrounds large-scale land transactions, said Ward Anseeuw of the Centre de Coopération Internationale en Recherche Agronomique pour le Développement (CIRAD).

“The Land Matrix has evolved from a database into a public tool promoting greater transparency in decision-making over land and investment at a global level,” Anseeuw said in a statement.