On March 27, 2019, the Research Consortium hosted a happy hour at the 2019 World Bank Land and Poverty Conference. The event attracted a mix of attendees from the conference, including leaders in the field of land rights and land tenure security. The happy hour reception was a chance for the attendees to learn more about how the Research Consortium fills in the gaps of knowledge for researchers and practitioners and was a chance for those who attended to deepen their ties to the Consortium. Remarks were made by one of the Research Consortium’s steering committee members, Rick Gaynor. He […]
The Impact of the Research Consortium
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How a New Land Rights Study Amplifies Women’s Hopes and Fears – and Makes us Think Again About Solutions for Everyone
By Kat Oak
This piece was originally written for and appeared on the blog From Poverty to Power, a conversational blog written and maintained by Duncan Green, strategic adviser for Oxfam GB. A couple of weeks ago, writing on this blog, Duncan asked a question: How do we, in the international development community, recognize and work with (let alone measure) issues like love, shame, fear, solidarity? As an advocate for women’s land rights, this question resonated with me. Whenever I hear from women about the fragility of those rights and their efforts to strengthen them – as I’ve done across 16 countries and […]
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Our Team is on the Road to #LandConf2019
By Kat Oak
Next week is the annual World Bank Land and Poverty Conference. This is one of the most important events of the year in the land rights sector. It’s a chance for a wide range of practitioners, researchers, and funders to connect and to learn more about each others’ work. It’s also a chance to step back and reflect on what we do, in the company of colleagues and peers. The conference begins on March 25th and will be attended by our entire team, who are traveling to Washington, DC from as far away as Australia. The team will be actively involved at the […]
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International Women’s Day and the Power of Women in Groups
By Kat Oak
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. I see this everywhere I go. Women are almost always working, even if I’m distracting them by gathering them for group discussions, […]
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Announcing the Recipients of the Research Consortium’s Inaugural Research Grants
By Kat Oak
In more than a decade of working on women’s land rights, I have often been asked the question “where is the evidence?” While we have more and more insight into how secure land rights benefit women, men, and communities, the question remains “how to get there?”: we don’t know as much as we should (or would like!) about what works, or does not, to improve land rights for women. That’s one of the most important objectives of the Research Consortium by Resource Equity: to start to fill in some of the gaps in evidence so that policy-makers, programmers, donors, and […]
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Got Questions?
By Kat Oak
In my line of work I think a good deal about women’s land rights—every day in fact. After working for over 20 years on helping women gain legal and social rights to the land they use, I am frustrated by the slow progress of the work being done. There has been progress, of course, but I am impatient—even a little bit exasperated. I know others in the field feel the same way and we all wonder why progress seems to happen so slowly. There are many complicating factors, and I could write a book on the nuances of the truly […]
CONTINUE READING Got Questions? 3 min read
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Big Changes to Your LandWise Library
By Kat Oak
We are excited to announce the newly updated LandWise Library website. LandWise is Resource Equity’s online library for primary legal materials, articles, and other practical resources. These resources are organized by country, topic, language, and document type. To see a quick overview of the library’s contents you can visit the browse page. In addition, LandWise houses a number of women’s land rights and land tenure security practice guides and tools that were created specifically to assist practitioners working in the field of women’s land rights. These guides include general frameworks for understanding land rights and inheritance and country-specific guides for […]
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Equal Inheritance Shares on the Horizon in the Arab World?
By Kat Oak
A bit of good women’s rights news has greeted us to end 2018. The Tunisian Cabinet recently approved a bill that will require male and female heirs be given equal inheritance shares. This is a first for the country, and is one of the first proposed bills of its kind in the Arab world. While the bill must now go to the Tunisian parliament for debate, this is still a victory for women’s land rights. We have seen in our work that equal inheritance rights on paper do not always translate to equal rights in practice, but good laws in […]
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As We Turn Four We Want to Say Thank You!
By Kat Oak
As Resource Equity turns four, we are reflecting on what motivated us to begin, and why we continue: ensuring women’s rights to land and natural resources are at the center of our work. We founded Resource Equity four years ago in order to center women in our work, and to ensure that women’s experiences, needs, and desires drive what we do. We know that secure land and resource rights are a critical building block that provide women, and their families and communities, the opportunity to prosper. However, for a long time, women’s voices have been excluded from land and resource […]
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“Sécurité Foncière des Femmes : un Cadre Conceptuel” est Maintenant Disponible en Français
By Kat Oak
C’est avec plaisir que nous accueillons notre blogueuse invitée, Philippine Sutz. Outre à nous avoir aidé à traduire notre Cadre Conceptuel, Philippine est basée à Londres où elle travaille en tant que ‘Senior Researcher’ auprès de l’International Institute for Environment and Development. Ses domaines de recherche principaux sont l’émancipation des femmes et l’accès des femmes au foncier. Le Consortium de Recherche, par Resource Equity, vient de publier la version française de ‘Sécurité Foncière des Femmes : un Cadre Conceptuel. Ce document, co-écrit par Cheryl Doss et Ruth Meinzen-Dick, est le premier outil du genre permettant une analyse systématique et cohérente de […]