Land governance, gender equality, and development cooperation: past achievements and remaining challenges

Most land governance reforms seek to enhance tenure security, encourage investments and thereby promote economic growth. In addition, recent land reforms increasingly attempt to secure women’s and other vulnerable groups’ access to land. This article reviews the extent to which gender equality in land tenure has been pursued as part of these reforms and examines the role played by donor cooperation in this regard. Despite significant progress in developing land legislation that upholds gender equality with respect to land rights implementation often does not follow suit, and women still face discrimination in their land tenure. Based on country case studies, the article identifies six challenges which need to be addressed by governments and their development partners in order to achieve gender equality with respect to land tenure.