Grassroots Women Organizing to Secure Key Assets

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Grassroots Women Organizing to Secure Key Assets

• Jan Peterson,
• Chair of the Huairou Commission

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Why land matters for women

• Land is a vital asset for ensuring womens
  security and empowerment. Just ensuring
  employment is not enough.
• Grassroots women are finding effective ways to
  secure control over land, housing and basic
  services

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The gendered asset gap is nothing new

• We are calling for new forms of partnerships and
  resource allocations so that organized groups of
  poor women can build a collective action platform
  to exert effective control over land, housing,
  property and other productive assets.

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Grassroots centered networks are shifting
power-relations and helping grassroots women to
secure land

• Slum/Shackdwellers International works on
  securing housing and land rights by creating mass
  organizing, based on changing how knowledge is
  produced and who owns and controls that knowledge
• The Huairou Commission
• GROOTS International
• Streetnet

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Key elements of our approach

• Casting women in the role of partners
• Mobilizing community based organizations
• Putting information in the hands of women.
• Creating safe spaces for women and children
• Making institutions responsive and accountable to
  communities.
• Restoring, diversifying and upgrading livelihoods
  to collective enterprise
• Transferring innovations through peer exchange

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Huairou Commission
AIDS - Disaster - Governance - Land

• Campaigns are based in womens on the ground
  collective organizing

• Womens groups engage in negotiations with
  decision-makers local to global to ensure their
  priorities are included in planning,
  policy-making and resource allocation

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An entry point to engage partners Land Mapping

• Land and property rights generally understood as
  issues simply of legal reform and literacy
• Grassroots-led mapping allows women to undertake
  more complex analysis of actors and power
  relations
• Mapping changes the way knowledge is produced and
  who controls it. Knowledge becomes the basis for
  strategic, collective action and organizing

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• In Kenya, mapping resulted in the creation
  Community Watch Dog Groups, a partnership between
  grassroots women, chiefs, community leaders and
  councillors

Watch Dog Groups, monitor local land practices,
prevent land seizures, raise awareness of
existing land policies and help guide women
through the process of getting their land back
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What needs to shift to scale up this approach and
increase positive impacts for grassroots women
and poor communities?

• Partners, researchers, development professionals,
  UN agencies and donors need to open up space for
  grassroots womens organizing

• Support initiatives and actions in which
  grassroots women are leaders
• Institutions need to be made responsive and
  accountable to communities

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Innovative Partnerships

• Womens Land Link Africa a partnership between
  grassroots womens groups (Huairou Commission),
  human rights (COHRE) and UN agencies (Habitat,
  FAO), in which grassroots women are supported to
  map tenure systems and scale up their own
  initiatives
• Slum/Shack Dwellers International and Society for
  the Promotion of Area Resource Centers (SPARC)
  have revolutionized partnerships. Professionals
  in SPARC act as support people for Slumdwellers
  groups
• Streetnet International and WIEGO, in which
  researchers create statistics based on the agenda
  set by informal workers unions