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Priority Women’s Land Rights Initiatives to be Launched at Convening in Ghana

Priority Women’s Land Rights Initiatives to be Launched at Convening in Ghana

The Women’s Land Rights Visiting Professionals Program (VPP), an initiative of the Landesa Center for Women’s Land Rights, will host a one-day regional convening to launch priority advocacy initiatives supporting the African Union Member States’ commitment to achieve a target of 30 percent women’s joint or individual ownership of land in Africa by 2025 and support the drafting of the Land Bill in Ghana.

African women have a significant role in agriculture where they contribute more than 60 percent of their labor towards food production, but many have no rights to the land they till. Without women having equal rights to land, the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) targets related to women’s empowerment and ending poverty and hunger will not be met.

The January 14, 2017 convening will take place at the Swiss Alisa Hotels, North Ridge, Accra and will be attended by alumni of the VPP from Kenya, Liberia, Tanzania, Uganda and Ghana in addition to other women’s land rights practitioners, academics, researchers and government officials in Ghana. They will discuss working with traditional justice systems to promote women’s land rights (WLR), using SDGs to monitor state level data gathering and efforts to improve WLR, the connection between WLR and gender- based violence and access to justice for WLR violations.

As the Government of Ghana continues to draft the Land Bill, Landesa joins the call by stakeholders urging government to: uphold the gender and spousal rights provisions on land that would address gender disparities in spousal ownership of land; include in the Land Bill a provision for a framework for the application of the free prior and informed consent and detail the procedures on how consultations should be done; uphold the provision for the harmonization of the large scale land acquisition in order to safeguard and protect the interest of the smallholder farmers and the vulnerable against land-grabbers and investors; and include in the Bill, provisions that create a framework for systematic and comprehensive registration and recording of customary rights, applying the AU guidelines on the use and management of common land under the Customary Land Secretariats (CLS).

 

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