Participants from South Africa and Nigeria

Participants in the Women Land Link Africa (WLLA) initiative from 10 countries came together last week to exchange experiences and practices in enhancing the capacity of grassroots women as they work to secure women’s land, housing and inheritance rights. Through this meeting, grassroots women took one more step in forming an innovative, on the ground, pan-African, peer learning community. Twenty-four grassroots women and leaders representing fourteen organizations in Southern, Eastern and Western Africa met in Nairobi from March 19th to March 22nd to engage in peer learning and plan for the third year of WLLA related activities and the future direction of phase two (years four through seven) of the WLLA partnership project.

The March 2007 Women Land Link Africa Leadership Meeting had five main goals:

1. To provide a space for exchange for groups that were involved in the first and second years of WLLA activities;
2. To allow grassroots women leaders to learn from the tools, practices, strategies and challenges that each of the leaders brought to the table;
3. To provide a forum for analysis of the issues that had emerged and strengths and weaknesses in addressing them;
4. To help to build the capacity of grassroots leaders through peer exchange and evaluation;
5. To develop an action plan, within the WLLA framework, for each organization represented as well as WLLA generally.

During the first day of the meeting, new WLLA year three group representatives from Uganda, Burundi, South Africa, and Tanzania were welcomed and introduced to participating leaders/representatives from Kenya, Rwanda, Zimbabwe, Ghana, Cameroon and Nigeria (who had participated in years one and two of the WLLA project)*. All representatives introduced themselves, their work, their expectations for the meeting and their visions for the future of WLLA and their own work. Following these introductions, the two WLLA facilitating organizations, the Huairou Commission and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) as well as the Leadership Meeting coordinating organization and host, GROOTS Kenya, provided an introduction and background of the WLLA project and reminded participants of the WLLA Mission to: Utilize both a human rights and development based approach, Women’s Land Link Africa (WLLA) supports, strengthens and increases the visibility of women’s initiatives at all levels, with a particular emphasis on the grassroots to have access to, control over and ownership of land, housing and property.

Throughout the first day representatives participated in small group discussions where they addressed the key issues that women are facing in their regions and communities with regard to securing land and property. A sample of these key overlapping issues included:

• lack of land ownership and security of tenure; lack of enforcement of laws; long and expensive legal systems and procedures;
• inadequate awareness on land inheritance rights by women;
• cultural and customary practices that discriminate and disempower women;
• and traditional male dominance of land systems.

Participants joining in song

Day two activities focused on the strategies women are using in their communities, the specific tools that they’ve identified, and defining these tools as well as setting them strategically within grassroots processes. In order to set the stage for the discussion to follow, year one WLLA groups including GROOTS Kenya, Rwanda Women’s Network, Ntengwe for Community Development Trust and Seke Rural Home Based Care all presented on the concrete tools and strategies that grassroots women, as a part of their organizations and networks, are using to make concrete changes in women’s ownership and control of land, housing and property. GROOTS Kenya presented on their “Intervention Model” whereby a series (in the form of 7 steps) of grassroots women’s strategies (including community based mapping, forming alliances with local authorities, and developing community action plans) are applied with an end result of forming lasting women-led community Watchdog Groups.

Grassroots women-organized Watchdog Groups was one of several tools to build a systematic, community-based response to the needs of women and orphans to work towards institutional and participatory protection of their assets. These groups have also served as platforms for grassroots women to access governance institutions, to influence legal structures, and to advocate against resource-stripping and the dispossession of women’s land and property. Other tools presented included income-generating programs, litigating test cases in their communities, community paralegal training, and many more. To further disseminate these tools, GROOTS Kenya and the Rwanda Women’s Network are working on a handbook on community based mapping from two perspectives which addresses different approaches to the community based mapping model which will be available later this year.

Watch Dog Group Members

On the third day of the meeting, participants were able to see the GROOTS Kenya Watch Dog model first hand during a field trip to Gatundu—a rural region one hour from Nairobi. Home-based caregivers formed this Watch Dog Group, as they continued to find widows and orphans being dispossessed of their marital and parental property when their spouses and parents died of AIDS.

Four chiefs were present at this meeting in Gatundu, as were other members of the Watch Dog Groups, and widows and orphans, who testified about how the Group helped them to get their land back without going through a lengthy and expensive legal process. A woman and her severely handicapped child told the visitors about how the Chief and the Watch Dog Group rebuilt her house when it was burned down with her husband in it. Having learned from their peers, nine communities in Kenya have now started Watch Dog Groups.

During the final day of the Leadership Meeting, representatives brainstormed activity and action plans for the third year of WLLA, including activities within their organizations that will compliment these activities. Activities focused on applying principles and processes for improving grassroots women’s empowerment, and identifying linkages, collaborations and areas where support is needed as well as areas where the WLLA can add value to what the organizations are already doing. Some of the main activities targeted for future plans during this session were Mapping, Watchdog Groups, Paralegal Training, Test Cases, and Peer Learning Exchanges.

During this afternoon session five Kenyan NGO representatives joined the meeting to add input both to the activity planning agenda and to input into future planning for linking and collaborating with African NGOs. Their participation reflected the second-phase focus of WLLA on scaling-up the linkages between African civil society organizations, in order to increase the capacity of grassroots women’s groups working on the ground to increase women’s ownership and control of land, housing and property. During this final session leaders addressed gaps and challenges and discussed the way forward for enhancing important linkages between themselves and other civil society groups. Additionally, leaders addressed the importance of grassroots attendance at international global meetings addressing women’s land and secure tenure issues.

The meeting allowed grassroots representatives to explore the important work that has been led by grassroots women and the challenges and gaps that they are facing. With the input from these representatives the WLLA project is moving forward with a strategic action plan for year three as well as a long-term plan for the next phase of the Women’s Land Link Africa initiative.

The Huairou Commission would like to thank and appreciate all of those leaders and representatives who took time out from their important work to share with their peers and to enter into this important dialogue and planning process. Thank you to all of the participations who attended and a special thanks to GROOTS Kenya for coordinating this important regional WLLA Leadership Meeting!

*Participating groups/organizations that attended the WLLA Leadership Meeting:

• Year 1 WLLA Groups – GROOTS Kenya, Rwanda Women’s Network (RWN), Seke Rural Home Based Care in Zimbabwe, Ntengwe for Community Development Trust in Zimbabwe
• Year 2 WLLA Groups – Ntankah Village Women Common Initiative Group (NVWCIG) in Cameroon, International Women’s Communication Center (IWCC) in Nigeria, Rural Media Network in Ghana, Ghana Homeless People’s Federation
• Year 3 WLLA Groups – Uganda Community Based Association for Child Welfare (UCOBAC), Association des Femmes pour l’Education el le Bien être des Enfants Orphelius (AFEBEO) in Burundi, Iterambere in Burundi, Land Access Group of South Africa (LAMOSA), Rural Women’s Movement in South Africa, and Maasai Women Economic Development Organization (MWEDO) in Tanzania

For more information on WLLA, contact Nicole Ganzekaufer: Nicole.Ganzekaufer@Huairou.org