Land & Housing
Over the past seven years, the Huairou Commission Land and Housing Campaign has provided a unique platform to establish grassroots women as key constituents in the land and property rights debate across the globe. The results have demonstrated that grassroots women-led strategies can stop asset stripping and land grabbing, reverse evictions, and influence effective implementation of land policies and programs that work for grassroots women and are grounded in evidence-based monitoring.
As members of the Huairou Commission, women develop a power base founded on community organizing, and skills and knowledge transfer. Their work is grounded in a holistic framework and approach, based both on community asset development strategies and a human rights approach to land and property issues. These women witness as their peers establish concrete examples of the power of grassroots women to anchor strategies and advocacy gains, towards significantly improving women's own lives and the realities of their communities.
Global Strategy
The Huairou Commission’s Global Strategy 2012-2015, Women, Land and Development (WLD) is based on a vision that merges two ideas:
- Women leading change - Empowering women to be agents of their own development
- Land for development - Recognition that land is a necessary (while not sufficient) condition for development
Land is a foundation for dignity, for meeting basic needs, for economic survival and social empowerment, equally important to women living in rural, peri-urban and urban areas. Among the institutions seeking to advance the rights and opportunities of women, WLD makes a distinct contribution by being grassroots based, led and governed.
The groups working on the land campaign have identified and prioritized a line of action for 2012-2015 that focuses on building the capacity of the members to identify entry points that bring forward women's land issues and locate them within a diverse development agenda. Resilience building and climate change is a key entry point in the nexus of the land for development strategy.
Land is a critical asset for cushioning poor women against the adverse impacts of climate change.
Land is a foundation for dignity, for meeting basic needs, for economic survival and social empowerment.
Vision
Public policies provide grassroots women with secure access to land and the related decision-making opportunities and resources for self-empowerment and improved human and economic well-being.
Goal
To increase the capacity and opportunity for grassroots women to gain their resource rights to land and economic development by establishing effective channels of dialogue and operation with multi-stakeholders. The main objectives is to support, strengthen and increase the visibility of women's initiatives to have access to and control over land, housing and property at all levels with particular emphasis on the community / grassroots.
Objectives
- Grassroots women engage in dialogue and land negotiations with global institutions and regional structures
- Grassroots networks empower community women through collective action and partnership
- Knowledge and experience of grassroots women influences the planning and decision-making at global, national and local levels
- To provide visibility, opportunity, solidarity and support to grassroots women and their organizations
Ongoing Activities
Engendering Bottom-up Justice Reform: Grassroots Women's Tools for Securing Access to Justice - Through a partnership between the Huairou Commission and the UNDP Democratic Governance Group, Bureau for Development Policy, grassroots women - supported by a researcher and technical team - are leading documentation and analysis of community justice strategies in six Sub-Saharan countries.The Engendering Access to Justice Initiative explores and documents:
- How women in poor communities access justice, by examining the strategies that they employ as they navigate the formal and customary justice structures and systems
- Emerging grassroots justice mechanisms, including Community Paralegals and Watch Dog Groups (pioneered by member group GROOTS Kenya), which women are using to address justice issues in their own communities as part of a wide range of strategies to secure their land, housing and property rights
Through the action research process grassroots women will gather and analyze data on their own community based strategies, develop a collective body of evidence on community justice and strengthen their advocacy skills.
Tools For Change 3 Country Pilot - The Tools for Change manual was produced in partnership with UNDP Aids Groups and Open Society Foundation. It is an accessible tool tool to make human rights concept clear and accessible, intended to be used by women who face issues of displacement or disinheritance, and their advocates. The Manual suggests a number of uses for human rights law in the struggle for land and property rights in the context of HIV/AIDS.
Three community organizations are piloting using the manual to claim access to justice and fairness within the context of land rights and HIV/AIDS in Uganda, Zambia and Cameroon. Through this, they will strengthen their ability to effectively negotiate and claim land and housing based on human rights law, especially in the context of HIV/AIDS.
Women's Land Link Africa (WLLA) Access to Justice and National Alliance Building - In order to enhance the breadth and comprehensiveness of the Engendering Access to Justice Initiative with UNDP, Women's Land Link Africa is carrying out two initiatives.
- Access to Justice Research: WLLA member groups in Zimbabwe and Uganda are carrying out action research that mirrors and complements the UNDP Engendering Access to Justice Initiative
- National Alliance Building: WLLA member groups in Uganda and Zambia are leveraging the engagement the groups are building through the Engendering Access to Justice Initiative to build the groups' capacity to participate in national policy forums and broad coalitions.
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