Strengthening Grassroots Women Leadership

Around the world, land, housing and natural resources are being commodified and exploited for profit.  In the name of development, indigenous peoples, peasants, fisher folk, nomadic groups and people living in urban and peri-urban areas face dispossession and impoverishment. Women experience disproportionate impacts of this development model and, when they stand up to defend the rights of their communities, they are often shunned, defamed or attacked.

Meanwhile, women are also building power and bolstering their leadership capacities. They are raising their voices and standing up for human rights all around the world. Although they face barriers at multiple levels, women leaders challenge conventional notions about what women are supposed to be, and bring enormous strength and resilience to the global struggle for change.

International human rights standards provide a foundation for women’s rights related to housing, land, and natural resources (HLNR), but substantial legal, structural, and social barriers continue to prevent women from enjoying substantive equality in relation to these rights.

In recent years, coordinated by the Working Group on Women and ESCR, grassroots women leaders have been articulating shared positions and advancing collective action on land and natural resources.

This collective work builds on strategic analysis by the Women and ESCR working group over the last several years, focused on member identification of and response to key factors in the realization of women’s rights related to housing, land and natural resources (HLNR) These include inadequate, discriminatory or poorly implemented legislative and policy frameworks; challenges in accessing justice for human rights violations; barriers to women’s equal access, use and control of HLNR due to adverse impacts of customary law and culture, religion and societal gender constructs; tenure insecurity and related human rights violations, in the face of macro-economic policies that benefit corporate interests or in conjunction with development models that ignore the primacy of human rights; the significance of intersectionality and the interrelatedness of HLNR and other human rights; and the continued repression of women human rights defenders working on HLNR issues.

In May 2018, in Nairobi, Kenya, women leaders from social movements and grassroots groups from Africa, Asia, and Latin America shared their stories of strength, resilience, and solidarity. The #WomenLeadOnLand video series features their testimonies. The second exchange of grassroots women leaders took place in Chiang Mai, Thailand (July 2019), led by ESCR-Net’s Women and ESCR, and the Social Movements working groups with substantive contributions from collective projects on corporate capture, climate justice, and community-led documentation.