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Advancing Women's Land & Resource Rights Advancing Women's Land & Resource Rights
Resource Equity - Advancing Women's land and resource rights

Our library is a comprehensive source of laws, articles, and research on women and land. You can access laws from the Landwise database, research, articles, and curated content from our Research Consortium, find a glossary of industry terms, and our responses to previous Help Desk inquiries.

If you can’t find what you are looking for, our librarians can help. Ask your question in our  Helpdesk.

First time users

How we select research and content

Important information about this resource

Help us fill the gaps

Ask for Research Help

Need help? Ask for research support from our helpdesk.

It’s not always easy to find the information and answers you’re looking for and we’re here to support people who work with and care about women gaining rights to land. 

How it works

Submit the specific women’s land rights question you are looking for answers to, and we will share the information and knowledge we have collected over the years. 

While we won’t always be able to answer every question we receive, nor can we provide legal advice for a specific situation, we strive to provide some sort of response to all questions within five working days of submission. In some cases, we may need to ask for additional information. All questions and answers are added to our knowledge-base search engine above so others can also have easy access to this information. Unless you choose to be named, the authors of all question submissions will remain anonymous.

Submit your question below. Remember to provide all the relevant details.
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Women's Land Rights - Foundational Pieces

These resources are the foundation for our work in women’s land rights

What Works for Women's Land and Property Rights? What we know and what we need to know.

This review of the available evidence on women’s land and property rights is aimed at identifying opportunities and needs for additional research. It’s based on a review of online literature and academic databases and discussions with global and national actors including practitioners, researchers, and activists. We propose a way forward for research that will inform practice and ultimately close the gender gap and improve economic and social outcomes for men and women around the world.

Country: Multiple Countries
Creator: Scalise, E. & Giovarelli, R.
Collection Type: Articles
Jurisdiction: None
Topics: Land Reform Equal Rights Land & Property

DOWNLOAD WHAT WORKS PAPER → (ENG | ES | FR)

Conceptual Framework

This framework is designed for use by both practitioners and researchers, to provide some shared concepts and language.3 When more consistent data is collected, both qualitative and quantitative, comparative analyses become more feasible. Every project, both interventions and research on the impacts, will want to focus on the particular issues relevant to them. By including some common information in the analysis and evaluations, we can see how the lessons might apply elsewhere.

DOWNLOAD CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK → (ENG | ES | FR)

Starting with Women

The Starting With Women (SWW) approach begins by asking what rights women have to land. It then moves on to strengthen and secure those rights, both within families and in the community. The approach starts from the view that women in all communities know what they want and need in terms of their land rights, and that with information, guidance, and support from one another, they can develop a plan to get what they want and need. For more information on the SWW approach, visit our blogs and download the pamphlet, the framework, and tools below.
DOWNLOAD THE  GUIDEBOOK→
DOWNLOAD TOOLKIT→

Quicklinks

Here are links to our most requested resources.

Foundational Pieces

Practice Guides

Evidence Briefs

What's Happening

News, views & events

Read up on the latest news, research, and events or learn more through our blog.

See all News, Views & Events
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How to use the Resource Equity Knowledge-base

This library is a consolidation of all our content from both Landwise and the Research Consortium. While we have a lot of information to share with you here, we still may not have everything you are looking for.

Start your research by searching the different resources available in our knowledge-base – Laws, Research and Publications and Q&A.

Next review the Research Process Practice Guide. In this guide, we help you to identify other sources for locating legal materials and resources to help you fill the gaps.

Once you have relevant materials to work from, from our database and from other sources suggested in the Research Process Practice Guide, you can use the applicable subject-specific Practice Guides to analyze the materials you have located through your research.

If you find you have questions that have not been answered, submit them using our Helpdesk.

If you have any comments, questions, or would like to submit a resource to include in our library, contact us.

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Methodology and criteria for inclusion in the curated content

Resource Equity identifies and analyzes research on interventions that touch on women’s land rights in some way. We monitor women and land listservs and databases as well as services that collect and disseminate research. We welcome submissions of research to be included in our curated platform (see criteria for inclusion below).

Resource Equity does not edit others’ work but provides commentary and context for the research. The aim is to catalogue and direct readers to original research through links in our knowledge-base.

Literature is reviewed by experts in the field of women’s land rights with the objective to help clarify what the research tells us and what it doesn’t tell us about the effectiveness of the intervention.

Criteria for inclusion

Studies are included if they:

  • Focus on an intervention that addresses an element of women’s land tenure security.
  • Are based on interventions that address women’s land rights and:
      • Land administration (titling, registration, and land certification)    
      • Natural resource governance    
      • Leasing and lifetime use rights    
      • Land-based investments    
      • Access to justice    
      • Legal empowerment (paralegals, legal aid, legal information, legal education)    
      • Social norm change    
      • Knowledge, attitude, behaviour change and awareness raising    
      • Women’s groups    
      • Women’s advocacy groups    
      • Human rights
  • Provide a clear explanation of the methodology used, the context of the study, the hypothesis tested, and the outcomes and
  • Are published and have been peer-reviewed. In the absence of this, the study should be accompanied by a letter of introduction from the author. If there is any question as to the validity of the research, two reviewers will be asked to make a ruling as to whether the study should be included or not.

Researchers don’t receive a payment if their work is posted on the Resource Equity platform. Resource Equity aims to provide a “public good” and will not pay any fees, nor will it accept payment, to promote research in our knowledge-base.

IMPORTANT INFORMATION ABOUT THIS RESOURCE

Collection Development

The Resource Equity library is a work in progress, and we are continually adding to our database. Our initial collection efforts focused on India and China. We will continue to collect materials in these countries and are expanding our collection efforts into several countries in Africa. Our goal is to provide access to land laws and family laws, and related material from as many countries as possible. We are interested in legal materials from all levels of government (national, state, and local). If you have any materials you would like to recommend for inclusion, contact us.

We update our database regularly but cannot guarantee that all laws are the most recent versions. Contact us if you have updated information.

Language and Translations

Many of the legal materials in the LandWise database are English translations of laws. Unless otherwise specified by the applicable government/legal jurisdiction, translations are not official versions of the laws, and users should be careful when using translated materials. We collect and provide access to materials in many different languages; however, at this time, we cannot provide English translations for all non-English laws.

Full-Text Availability

We strive to make as many full-text materials available as possible. However, some useful resources are copyright protected, and we cannot provide free access to full-text copies. In the case of copyright-protected articles, we provide a citation and a brief summary of the article and then link users to the source where they can purchase the article.

Disclaimers

The information contained in this website is general legal information and should not be construed as legal advice to be applied to any specific factual situation. The information contained in Resource Equity’s Knowledge-base cannot replace the advice of competent legal counsel licensed in your jurisdiction.

In preparing the information contained on this website, Resource Equity has endeavored to ensure information is as accurate and current as possible. However, inadvertent errors can occur. Therefore, this website’s information is provided “as is” without any guarantee or warranty of any kind, expressed or implied.

This website contains links to other resources on the Internet. Those links are provided as citations and aids to help you identify and locate other Internet resources that may be of interest and are not intended to state or imply that we sponsor or are affiliated or associated with the persons or entities who created such site, nor are the links intended to state or imply that we are legally authorized to use any trade name, registered trademark, logo, legal or official seal, or copyrighted symbol that may be reflected in the links.

Policy Concerning Intellectual Property Infringement Claims

Claims of alleged copyright or other intellectual property infringement must be in writing. Resource Equity will process and investigate proper notices of alleged copyright or other intellectual property infringement related to material on its websites or servers and respond appropriately. Under appropriate circumstances, Resource Equity will act expeditiously to remove or disable access to the material claimed to be infringing or claimed to be the subject of infringing activity. 

Copyright Notice
Landwise, by Resource Equity, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Based on a work at https://resourceequity.org.
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If you have any comments, questions, or would like to submit a resource to include in our library please contact us.

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Help us build up this library

Our library is a powerful hub for the collection, sharing, and exchange of knowledge on how to effectively advance women’s land rights. Together, we identify gaps in knowledge and help develop a common agenda for research so that learnings can more easily be compared, shared, and applied.

We welcome your support and participation in continuing to build this resource for our industry.  

Benefits of Participating

Participants contribute to the knowledge of what works to improve women’s rights to land and where best to focus on research. Your contribution helps us to help others learn about what works.

By participating, you also become part of a community that is working towards advancing women’s rights across the globe.

Why are we asking you to help us build this resource?

By working together, we can increase the quantity and quality of research while providing opportunities for further research with the goal of overcoming barriers to women’s secure land and resource rights around the world.

Contact Us

If you have any comments, questions, or would like to submit a resource to include in our library please contact us.

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