Back to the land…

source: Grameen Foundation

The Grameen Bank and the micro-lending boom that it spawned didn’t set out to discriminate by gender in its lending.  Still, the preponderance of their loans are to women.  As the Grameen Foundation web site explains:

Why women? Studies have shown that women use the profits from their businesses to send their children to school, improve their families’ living conditions and nutrition, and expand their businesses. The fruits of their businesses not only make an impact on themselves and their families, but entire communities.

But as powerful a development tool as micro-finance can be, it has its limits– starting with the requirement that loans go (again quoting the Grameen site) “to start or expand very small, self-sufficient businesses.”  These entrepreneurs are necessary to eradicating poverty, but they aren’t sufficient.

The development community is realizing that land rights reform has as big– or bigger– a role to play.

As Katherine Gustafson points out on Change.org,

Women grow more than half of the world’s food and the lion’s share (as much as 80 percent) of the food in developing countries, reports the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Despite their majority contribution, however, women only own 2 percent of the world’s land, according to UN WomenWatch. Around the world, women are deprived of legal rights to the land they toil over day after day.

The U.S. government is stepping up to the issue.  At the recent meeting of the Clinton Global Initiative, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton promised that women would be at the heart of the international agricultural priorities of the Obama administration– efforts that include a minimum of $3.5 billion over the next three year as a contribution to the $20 billion pledged by all the G-8 nations toward strengthening global agricultural systems.   She explained,

We have seen again and again . . . that women are entrepreneurial, accountable, and practical. So women are a wise investment. And since the majority of the world’s farmers are women, it’s critical that our investments in agriculture leverage their ambition and perseverance.

And NGO’s are active as well.  Perhaps most notably, the Rural Development Institute– an organization whose pioneering land reform work has helped over 400 million people out of poverty in 40 countries over the last 40 years– is founding the Global Center for Women’s Land Rights to accelerate research and advocacy for policies that will help women gain legal access to their land.

RDI’s meticulous research into the results of their projects over the last four decades confirms that land reform does in fact lift its beneficiaries out of poverty and benefit the economies of the countries in which its undertaken.  But in fact, it benefits almost everything else in the country as well– from the environment through state of health and education to the viabllity of its democracy.

It’s when we confront the lives of those living in poverty– the 3.4 billion in this world living on $2 a day– that we realize just how much we take for granted in our own lives.  As RDI is demonstrating, it may be that the most fundamental of those “entitlements” is our ability to trust that what we own is in fact ours, and to build on that.

The eradication of poverty will take many kinds of efforts, delivered in many kinds of ways, over years.  But it is increasingly clear that the eradication of poverty most effectively starts with land rights reform– with the extension of the fundamental right to own and to build on what one owns to the 3.4 billion people around the world without it.  And that land reform starts with the women who will make it sing.

Learn more here.

source: RDI