1.
Land, gender & environmental
change
Challenges of defeminisation or
feminisation of agriculture
Case of Sahelian countries

2.
Rural Land, mother resource
• Land : mother resource for family farming :
livelihoods depending on access to land for
men women and youth
• Land is a complex resource : farmland,
bush/commons, irrigated perimeters, with
different values...
• Land is a changing/ evolving resource, with a
trend for growing scarcity in sub saharan
Africa and especially Sahel

3.
Land, an asset ? Women, an asset?
• Traditional/ customary : land was not OWNED by
men (mainly – cases of mammy queens in Sierra
Leone) ; they were custodians, managers, from
ancestors to the future generations ; land was
sacred; now: a commodity
• Women’s access was ruled by men according a
principle of equity and availability ; they were
“given” what they could farm ; as a result security
was not depending on ownership

4.
Climate & environmental change boost
scarcity and upset the rules
• A vicious circle started 40 years ago (the 70s
droughts) and accelerated from 30 years on:
• demographic growth (Niger 7.8 children per woman) +
• restriction of rainfall agriculture space to south
(droughts + practice) = hard competition on land,
and more for irrigated land
• Multiple and growing forms of land grabbing
• Multiple changes in the environment : global
economy, religions, commoditisation of land
insecurity, policies, legislation, technologies

5.
Gender and land grabbings:
growing risks of exclusion
• Female farmers & land: mother resource for
accumulation of assets; nearly no alternatives
• External (international) land grabbing more and
more known, but few research and data on
gender impacts (is women only labour force a problem ?
• National /local grabbing (well off urban, military,
politicians, traders vs poor farmers, less
vulnerable farmers vs poorer : idem
• Ignored or denied : land grabbing inside the
household : men vs women ; gender war...

6.
Assets and rights are not static:
an entry point for gender
• Access to land was a right for women and a
duty/requirement for men to ensure it
• Scarcity, greediness, religions of the Book
(christianity, Islam) have changed the rules
• Challenge is : who says the law, the rights ?
Women, youth, allochtones are confronted to
3 systems of law : customary, religious,
statutory

7.
Right based approach: yes but which
rights for women?
• Tectonic of the 3 systems of law often detrimental to
women and not knowing people (definition of poverty=
rights always denied against a rich)
• Religion: (Islam here) ambiguous use or
instrumentation by men vs women’s vigilence
– Seclusion from fields, confinement at home, forced field
rest : justification for women’s land grabbing inside HH and
growing conflictual gender relations
– Women claim their heritage, including land : unequal (50%
or less) but effective and ensuring ownership / control;
• From religion to statutory law : women go to justice to
claim their religion-based rights to land

8.
Policies, donors, legislation :
challenge : implementation
• Slowly growing interest for gender issues in land
legislation, but many biases & myths:
• Ownership & title as the panacea to secure land as an
asset(WB) : for whom ? For which type of women ?
Which type ofland (irrigated?) Is gender to support the
less vulnerable (this not visible in data/statistics)
• Equality is assessed in constitution and statutory law,
including land (Code rural) but implementation is far
away from this
• New institutions are hardly a gender friendly
environment (quotas of 10% in land commissions)

9.
Beyond land : survival, welfare,
security, power ???
• Land: basis for w’s accumulation: field -goat-sheep-
cow-savings & credit-other assets-field-redistribution
to daughters and sons
• Narrow link between defeminisation of agriculture and
feminisation of poverty : case of Haïti, Niger, Sahel and
exposure to disaster risks (Haïti, a forgotten issue as
well) but ; research and accurate data cruelly missing
• Narrow link between w’s status and access to and
assets : see “femmes jardin” in Haïti, landless women/
hopeless women in Niger
• Narrow link with food security : gender and food
sovereignty not enough explored : research, data

10.
Strategies : coping-immediate-poor
vs sustainable - resilience
• The landless (women & men) and the poorest are
cornered and may accelerate environmental
degradation
• Individual strategies and collective strategies:
agency/empowerment for land : womens groups
& associations, traditional or modern, new
farmers’ organisations (men & women), new
alliances of landless or poor rural : case of IFETE:
gender as an eye opener, booster of initiatives
and added value

11.
Innovative solutions
• Gender fatigue ? Donors’fatigue ? Gender
sceptics, gender blockers ? Do not cry, be bold
• Transformation /changes at local level : from
women seen as an asset by husbands, mothers in
law and families, to new generation, new
couples, new visions : build on this
• New organisational dynamics, female only or
mixed, up to rural trade unions
• New technologies, cell phones, smart phones,
web: this is not to morrow, it is to day

12.
Gender & IIED
• Build on IIED strong points (see Strategy) and “engender”
them for added value and not constraint (cf. Land tenure,
differential vulnerability to CC & DDR, pastoralism etc.)
• Partnership is viewed as a strong point : build on this for a
gender/environment/CC networking with priority to southern
voices
• Agenda of research, designing datas to be produced, sex
disaggregated, interpreted through gender analysis and
perspectives, in relation to domains above : produce evidence
to influence policies and donors
• Address language and geographic barriers : diversity of
souths, sharing experiences between anglophone, hispano-
lusophone and francophone countries : web, newsletter,
briefing, workshops ..