Gender Land And Livelihoods In East Africa

Gender, Land, and Livelihoods in East Africa: Through farmers eyes

Are women's fragile land rights in Africa being eroded in a period of privatisation and land reforms sponsored by the World Bank? Changing global employment and trade patters and the HIV/AIDS epidemic has affected women in particular. A complexity is that women's and men's interests within households are both joint and separate, yet many land reform programmes are based on the notion of a unitary household in which resources benefit the whole family. Today new land market opportunities also tend to put women at a disadvantage, just as they were under colonialism. Women's secondary rights to land are being extinguished. The detailed, local level research in this volume not only challenges the status quo, but demonstrates that another world is possible and documents the many ways women in Eastern Africa are finding to ensure their rights to land.

This collection examines women's land rights in East Africa in the context of land tenure reforms and privatization.

Livelihoods in rural Africa are changing in response to disappearing job prospects, falling agricultural output and collapsing infrastructure. This book explains why the responses to these challenges are so different in different parts of Africa. Making a Living uses case studies from commercial farming regions in Kenya, Tanzania and Zimbabwe and from much poorer areas within eastern and southern Africa.to give a broad comparative study of rural livelihoods. These case studies reveal how household relations, poverty and gender all play a part in the changing political economy of rural Africa.

This book presents a wide-ranging overview of the position of women in Timor-Leste, 15 years after the country secured its independence. It considers the role of women in Timor-Leste’s history, explores their role in the present day economy and politics, and discusses their contribution to culture and society. The contested meaning of gender itself is investigated in the contemporary culture of this new society. It applies a wide range of different feminist theories and approaches, and concludes with a discussion of what new directions gender studies in Timor-Leste might take.

For centuries, new technologies and expanding networks of production and consumption have been changing the face of rural economies in significant ways. Millions of rural dwellers have found survival increasingly difficult and have fled to urban centres. Others have remained: some retrenching, struggling to just subsist, others attempting to innovatively redefine their place within ‘new’ rural economies. Over the past 30 years, rural economies have largely been ignored by policy makers, but recent growing concerns about food security, environmental degradation, climate change, continued rural poverty, and high rates of out-migration have sparked renewed interest in rural regions. Covering a range of geographical and socio-cultural contexts, the case studies in this book draw on actor-oriented in-depth field studies, which provide detailed, locally focused perspectives on the nature of rural livelihoods today. The collection highlights the ways in which rural livelihoods are being redefined, the multiple ways in which rural dwellers draw on distinct social, cultural and environmental resources to formulate their livelihood strategies, and the factors which facilitate or limit their abilities to do so. This volume will be of interest to development practitioners and policy makers, and scholars working in rural development and economic anthropology.

This book investigates the barriers to women’s economic empowerment in the Global South. Drawing on evidence from a wide range of countries, the book outlines important lessons and practical solutions for promoting gender equality. Despite global progress in closing gender gaps in education and health, women’s economic empowerment has lagged behind, with little evidence that economic growth promotes gender equality. International Development Research Centre’s (IDRC) Growth and Economic Opportunities for Women (GrOW) programme was set up to provide policy lessons, insights, and concrete solutions that could lead to advances in gender equality, particularly on the role of institutions and macroeconomic growth, barriers to labour market access for women, and the impact of women’s care responsibilities. This book showcases rigorous and multi-disciplinary research emerging from this ground-breaking programme, covering topics such as the school-to-work transition, child marriage, unpaid domestic work and childcare, labour market segregation, and the power of social and cultural norms that prevent women from fully participating in better paid sectors of the economy. With a range of rich case studies from Burkina Faso, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ethiopia, Ghana, India, Kenya, Nepal, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Uganda, this book is perfect for students, researchers, practitioners, and policymakers working on women’s economic empowerment and gender equality in the Global South.