Ten women from the Huairou Commission attended the first meeting of UN-Habitat Global Land Tools Network’s (GLTN) Grassroots Mechanism held in Nairobi on 14th and 15th March 2007. At this meeting, organized by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions on behalf of UN Habitat, grassroots women from our network presented the land practices that they have developed, and identified the concerns that many grassroots women have with regard to the ways in which land is administered, allocated, used and transferred.

The strength of grassroots practices came out clearly in presentations by the representatives from five grassroots organizations from five countries.

The Watchdog groups of GROOTS Kenya and the Vigilance groups of Women United, Peru drew attention to the processes by which poor women are dispossessed of their land and the strategies that community women’s groups have devised to monitor and guard against about such land-grabbing practices, demand public accountability, and ensure that women retain control over their land resources. The funds created by Lumanti Support Group for Shelter, Nepal and Women United for a Better Community, Peru to acquire and develop their land assets showed the creative and large-scale financial assets and skills developed by poor women’s collectives to overcome the lack of formal finance available from the financial sector to the poor to acquire and develop land and housing.

The Huairou Commission and its partners shared some of the key lessons on creating the capacity and space that would enable the poor to participate in mainstream land politics and policies from an empowered and informed position:

• Creating collectives that can address the immediate, day-to-day needs and crises: examples include savings and credit groups and watchdog groups (Kenya and Peru)
• Owning a collective women’s space: to overcome the marginalisation of women from private and public spaces
• Creating community resources - funds, enumerations, maps, spaces etc - which allow the poor to build participatory management, leadership and deliberative skills
• Horizontal expansion - Face to face learning: Peer exchanges and study tours
• Vertical expansion - Building and institutionalising links across individual collectives of the poor, including federations and cooperatives
• Creating fora for dialogue with public officials and private stake-holders and developing new and inclusive institutional arrangements: local to local dialogue and study tour

One of the key discussions of the meeting revolved around the GLTN mechanism itself, and the ways in which it, as a UN-Habitat facility, could engage with and support the concerns and practices of grassroots communities on land. Several suggestions were offered to the GLTN on how to take this process forward including: creating an inventory of grassroots practices around land use and allocation; supporting the experimentation and scaling-up of grassroots work on land, expanding processes of peer learning around land; and focussing on one key issue, like evictions, to work out what role GLTN could play in supporting the work of grassroots communities on evictions.

What became apparent in the course of the discussion was that while the GLTN and UN-Habitat are interested in ensuring that grassroots concerns inform the GLTN, the methodology and institutional arrangements for such an engagement are still to be worked out. On a substantive level, two key challenges for the GLTN will be to ensure that it becomes a genuine participatory forum for the poor and that the GLTN intervenes in the large-scale processes by which the poor are being dispossessed of land through the development of pro-poor land tools.

The Huairou Commission within the Global Land Tools Network

The GLTN is a recent initiative of UN-Habitat, which the Huairou Commission has been engaged with since its first meeting in Oslo in March 2006. Our presence in the GLTN aims to ensure that the voices of poor women get heard, and their practices and strategies around land issues get recognised and incorporated into broader policy-making processes around land, housing and human settlements. Through the GLTN, UN-Habitat seeks to train the spotlight on the practices, policies and institutions related to land in an attempt to review and transform existing formal land administration in order to make them more efficient, equitable and relevant. Given that it is estimated that the existing land administration institutions serve only 15 percent of the population, this initiative is an extremely welcome one.

The Grassroots Mechanism is a forum within the GLTN that is supposed to ensure that the conditions, concerns and practices of the poor centrally inform the land management practices that are developed and institutionalised as a result of GLTN’s efforts. The aim of the meeting was to understand how grassroots concerns and practices can best inform the GLTN and consequently, to create a framework for assessing what makes a land-tool pro-poor, and understanding how such tools can be scaled-up. UN-Habitat has partnered with three networks of NGOs and grassroots organizations – the Huairou Commission, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), and Slum Dwellers’ International (SDI) – to lead the consultations on grassroots concerns on land.

The Huairou Commission delegation consisted of grassroots women and NGO leaders from Peru (Estrategia and Women United for a Better Community), Kenya (GROOTS Kenya), Nepal (Lumanti Support Group for Shelter), Tanzania (Maasai Women’s Empowerment and Development Organisation), Russia (Information Center of the Independent Women’s Forum), as well as representatives of the Huairou Commission Secretariat. Each presented the land practices that they have developed and identified the concerns that many grassroots women have with regard to the ways in which land is administered, allocated, used and transferred.

The next GLTN Consultation will focus on gender relations with regard to land use, allocation and administration, and will be lead by the Huairou Commission in August in Nairobi.

For more information contact Nicole Ganzekaufer: Nicole.Ganzekaufer@Huairou.org