Context
In spite of progress in policy and practice worldwide, many grassroots women lack ownership, control or even access to housing, land and property. This reality severely undercuts women's abilities to live full and meaningful lives along with their families and communities, especially when their lives are confounded by war, disaster, HIV/AIDS, government corruption and a lack of economic opportunities. Nevertheless, grassroots women's groups have been applying a wide array of strategies to enforce and reform property laws.
While legal rights are an important platform in the effort to secure tenure for women, formal legal and constitutional rights co-exist with cultural, social, economic and political realities that often obstruct poor women from realizing their rights. In seeking to strengthen women's access to and control over land, traditional rights-based approaches often prioritize legal rights and legal reform, overlooking the underlying power dynamics that exist within families and communities that keep women from owning and controlling land and property.
The Huairou Commission is working with grassroots women's groups to identify innovative on-the-ground strategies and practices that women are using to fight for their rights to land and property at the local, national and international levels. The Huairou Commission focuses on grassroots women as the initiators of actions and problem-solvers within their communities, rather than as the recipients of legal aid, and works with grassroots women to highlight the strategies and practices they are implementing to improve women's social, economic and political status within their communities. Empowering women working at the grassroots is essential to increasing poor women's access to land, housing and property.
The vision of the Huairou Commission's Land and Housing Campaign is to:
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Increase women’s access to and control over land, housing and property |
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Build the capacity of economic and livelihoods programs that enable women to work and maintain their land |
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Increase grassroots women's participation in decision-making |
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Build the capacity of grassroots women to communicate and transfer their skills and strategies in reducing women's poverty, improving local housing and living conditions and fostering local governance that is open and responsive to poor communities |
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Reduce the feminization of poverty |
While advocating for this larger vision, the Huairou Commission's grassroots members struggle daily in their local communities for access to adequate housing and for control over land and property. Member organizations, for example, support women's construction schemes, sanitation projects, collective farming, land reclamation and the sharing of agricultural and other tools to generate income.
To strengthen all these efforts, the Land and Housing Campaign is focused on facilitating grassroots women's groups to share effective strategies. Its goal is to identify and map successful practices and tools used by member organizations so they may be shared with others, as well as used in campaigns advocating for change in discriminatory law, policies and practices.
Download the Huairou Land brochure in PDF here >> |
