Secure Land Rights for Women: Indispensable for Sustainable Development

Assuring and securing land rights for women requires transformation at various levels— individual, familial and societal; only then will development goals become a sustainable reality in the foreseeable future

W orldwide, the concept of secure land rights for women is increasingly getting acceptance as key to sustainable and equitable development. The implementation period of Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) gets over in 2015; the United Nations, with the support of government and civil society organizations all over the world, has initiated a process of formulating ‘Sustainable Development Goals’ (SDGs) to replace MDGs. This is being done in a bottom-up approach. SDGs are based on the experience of MDGs and aim at making them more explicit and elaborate. Instead of capturing only growth and development, the new framework tries to capture people’s aspirations, rights and concerns for ecological sustainability. The issue of secure rights for women over land is discussed three times in the proposed SDG document—in the sections on gender equality, ecological sustainability and indigenous people’s right over land. This shows how crucial women’s secure land rights are for gender equality and for community development.

However, worldwide, women are largely regarded as the responsibility or property of men—be it in Africa or in South Asia, where the countries perform poorly in the Gender Development Index (GDI), or in Latin America, where in most countries, on an average, they perform somewhat better in GDI. A women farmer from Guatemala said, “Society is not comfortable with land rights for women because how can a property own a property.” Through history, irrespective of religion, both land and women have been considered man’s property and this defines his social value. In pre-Islamic Arabia, the number of wives a man had was the measure of a man’s value in society; and, like property, after the death of the father, the older son used to inherit all the wives, except his biological mother.