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Landesa and USAID's Justice Project Continues to Pay Dividends
Two years after Landesa completed the Kenya Justice Project, we returned to Ol Pusimoru, Kenya to learn about the project's longer-term impact.
The number of women who have been elected tribal elders, a position that calls on them to serve as community leaders and mediators, now stands at 22. The community elders and chiefs continue to support and promote women's rights, and land rights in particular. Elders and chiefs also continue to require spousal consent for all property transactions to prevent men from selling property without the consent of their spouse.
With support from community leaders, domestic violence has been reduced. Girls continue to attend secondary school in unprecedented numbers. Two years after our intervention, not a single girl has dropped out of school due to marriage or pregnancy. The chief and assistant chief report that the community has experienced significant economic development since the project's conclusion, which they attribute in part to the empowering effect of the Justice Project on community members. Learn more about the Justice Project and our work in Kenya.
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Learn More About Our Girls Project 
Landesa has developed a suite of resources for our partners and supporters to spread the word about our Girls Project.
The Girls Project, a partnership between the government of West Bengal and Landesa, aims to position girls to realize land rights as women, improving their long-term economic and social prospects and enabling them to reduce the vulnerabilities (including child marriage, lack of education, and malnutrition) that they face as adolescents in the immediate term.
More than 40,000 girls are currently participating in the project, learning about their rights to own and inherit land and receiving training in intensive gardening skills during regular meetings led by the girls themselves with support from government rural health workers.
Girls who participate in the program are more likely to stay in school, marry later in life, and have an asset in their name. Learn more:
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Landesa Shares Expertise at World Bank Conference
With support from the Ford Foundation, Landesa hosted high-level delegations from Kenya and Uganda at the World Bank's Land and Poverty Conference in March.
Landesa staff and the delegations discussed best practices in land tenure and how to implement both countries' national land policies. You can find highlights about the conference on Landesa's Focus on Land in Africa website.
Landesa staff also presented ten research papers at the conference to share our knowledge and learnings with other land tenure experts from around the world. View summaries of each paper.
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Landesa Pilots Women First Model in Uganda
 The Landesa Center for Women's Land Rights developed and piloted a model for working with women and their communities to strengthen women's land tenure security in Northern Uganda. The project significantly improved women's sense of security of their rights to land. A final project report and a step-by-step toolkit that provides practitioners with the resources needed to replicate this model are available through the project website.
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Landesa is Participating in GiveBIG Today
Landesa is participating in one of the largest yearly giving campaigns in the Seattle region. May 6 is GiveBIG Day, where donations made through the Seattle Foundation website will be stretched thanks to GiveBIG sponsors.
Learn more about today's event.
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May 6, 2014
Landesa in the News
The East African published an op-ed by Landesa CEO Tim Hanstad about the importance of land rights for women and men in the post-2015 Sustainable Development Goals discussions and how improvements to land rights might be best measured.
The Economist cites Landesa research in an article on the detrimental effect of China's local governments seizing farmland.
Watch Landesa land tenure specialist Hirut Girma discuss how to support women entrepreneurs at the Skoll World Forum.
The Christian Science Monitor highlights Landesa as one of six organizations empowering women in agriculture.
quotes Landesa senior advisor Dr. Tajamul Haque in an article on the relationship between women, land, and power.
From Landesa's Field Focus Blog
Landesa founder Roy Prosterman shares four proven innovations to provide secure land rights based on his remarks to the European Parliament's High-Level Conference on Property Rights in April. Landesa CEO Tim Hanstad makes the case for land rights - one of ten posts in a commentary series produced jointly by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Landesa. The commentary series highlights the importance of securing land rights for smallholder farmers and ran concurrently with the World Bank's 2014 Land and Poverty Conference in March. |
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