Tibaijuka lobbies for women`s empowerment

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Lands, Housing and Human Settlement Development minister Prof Anna Tibaijuka has said that women have to be empowered to own land if Africa wants to make poverty history.

“Surely, unless we do something about women’s access to land we will not be able to fight against poverty effectively,” Tibaijuka said in Arusha yesterday.

She was officiating at the 2011 Women’s Land Link Africa (WLLA) Grassroots Women’s Land Academy conference hosted by Maasai Women Development Organisation (Mwedo).

The 4th annual Land Academy conference, facilitated by American-based Huairou Commission, attracted 45 grassroots women’s groups from 13 sub-Saharan African countries.

Prof Tibaijuka said it was a pity that grassroots women, who are farmers, had often been turned into labourers on farms producing for men.

“Due to historical factors, women have been marginalised in land ownership, making the situation for women very precarious in Africa,” she noted, stressing the need for women’s empowerment so that they could deliver better.

Prof Tibaijuka, a Tanzanian economist by profession and practice, said women were able if empowered.

For her part, Jan Peterson, founder and chair of the Huairou Commission secretariat, was worried about climate change, underlining the need for women to be prepared to address its adverse impact.

Huairou Commission (HC) has been a partnering institution with UN Habitat since its inception in 1995, acting as a podium for women working on human settlements to participate collectively at the global level in grassroots women’s leadership.

HC’s land and housing campaign says that “empowering women working at the

grassroots level is essential to increasing poor women’s access to land, housing and property”.

Its campaign started as a response to the work of grassroots women’s organisations in securing tenure for women, reversing evictions, securing titles, curbing inheritance problems and fighting against discriminatory land tenure policies.

The Land and Housing campaign aims at transforming dominant social, political and cultural perceptions and practices that hinder or deny women’s access, control and ownership of land and property.

These perceptions and practices suppress a critical role that women play in

development, production and management.

Mwendo executive director Ndinini Kimesera Sikar urged the government to create an enabling environment for women to own land.

The four-day conference will deliberate on grassroots women’s strategies and approaches on negotiations with legal and customary systems around women’s land ownership.

The Academy will highlight grassroots women’s effective strategies including community watchdog groups to stop land grabbing in the context of HIV/Aids and organising models of community paralegals.

Other strategies to be highlighted are pastoralist women forums that have

successfully developed negotiation mechanisms to increase women’s leadership role and participation in decision making processes around land and livelihoods especially increasing women’s access to justice in their communities.

“Women’s Land Link Africa (WLLA) provides a unique platform for grassroots women.

The WLLA is grassroots women focused and driven – it is a platform for women’s organisations to develop and share innovative responses to women’s lack of secure land and housing tenure,” Ndinini explained.