Nelly Bassily | March 8, 2010
The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations recently launched a database that gathers information on land rights and access to land in 78 countries. The Gender and Land Rights Database contains information on the major social, economic, political, and cultural factors that impact women’s rights and access to land. It seeks to highlight the inequalities between men and women with regard to land access. The FAO calls this inequality “one of the major stumbling blocks to rural development.”
The online database includes both national and customary laws governing land use; property rights and inheritance; international treaties and conventions and land tenure. It also lists civil society groups that work on land issues, and provides other related statistics. Database users can access all information available for a particular country, or select specific topics, such as the total number of land holders in a specific state. The database also generates reports which compare two or more countries.
The Gender and Land Rights Database can be found at: http://www.fao.org/gender/landrights.