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Women’s legal empowerment

Wikis > Women’s legal empowerment
The ability to Access to land and to claim, use, and defend land and other natural resource tenure rights – of individuals and groups – is contingent on processes of empowerment. Women face additional hurdles to empowerment, ranging from their status within the household and community to their status under customary and/or statutory law. While many countries make reference to gender equality in their constitutions, laws relating to property rights often do not give equal status to women, or, where they do, women’s property rights may not be respected in practice. Even when women have de jure property rights, their de facto control of land is tenuous. Frequently, women access land through male relatives only, and not in their own right. Generally speaking, women have fewer benefits and protections under legal systems than men and are excluded from decision-making, and few opportunities exist for women to exert real influence over the development of their communities.

Women’s empowerment: the 3 dimensions

It is thus extremely important to address the specific hurdles faced by women in becoming empowered, esepcially so as to encourage women’s equal participation in society. There are many aspects to empowerment, all of which are interlinked:

  • economic empowerment, i.e. appropriate skills, capabilities and resources and access to secure and sustainable incomes and livelihoods – for which secure land rights are key (SIDA (2009) for example, defines women’s economic empowerment as “the process which increases women’s real power over economic decisions that influence their lives and priorities in society”, to achieve economic empowerment, women must get access to and control over resources, including, critically for rural women, land and other natural resources);
  • social empowerment, i.e. a process that helps people gain control over their own lives, being able to act on issues that people define as important for their lives (Page and Czuba 1999);
  • political empowerment, i.e. the capacity to analyse, organise and mobilise, participate in collective action for change, related to empowerment of citizens to claim their rights and entitlements (Piron and Watkins 2004).

Legal empowerment, which could be seen as sub-set of political empowerment, has gained increasing prominence in recent years. One of the first organisations to use the concept of legal empowerment was the Asian Development Bank , focusing on the ability of women and disadvantaged groups to use legal and administrative processes and structures to access resources, services, and opportunities, and closely linked to providing skills and confidence to project beneficiaries (ADB 2001). The concept of legal empowerment gained particular prominence with the establishment of the UN’s Commission for the legal empowerment of the poor (CLEP), which completed its work in 2008.

While this term applied to a whole range of activities in the areas of legal literacy and legal services that NGOs had been carrying out for decades, the CLEP drew attention to the
fact that most of the poor lack access to the rule of law – and that the law should serve the poor, not act as a barrier to exercising their rights. Though “property rights” does not capture the various rights associated with women’s access to and control over land, the CLEP’s vision of property rights as a basic human right and one of the four pillars central to the legal empowerment of the poor illustrates the importance of legal empowerment to securing women’s land rights. To be productive, rights to assets must be recognised by a system that includes both individual and collective property rights and that recognises customary rights.

The CLEP’s definition has been echoed also in the UN Secretary-General’s report on legal empowerment of the poor and the eradication of poverty (UN 2009). This report is useful, as it considers access to justice not just in terms of judicial access and law enforcement, but also includes paralegal and informal dispute resolution – for instance, traditional justice systems that most rural poor use to settle land conflicts. Importantly, the report also goes beyond defining poverty merely in terms of income and assets, and includes the ability to claim rights and organisational capacity as criteria. Furthermore, a linkage is made between legal empowerment and accountability of the state towards its citizens, with legal empowerment strengthening the voice of citizens from the grassroots upwards. Central importance is given to gender equity, more than by the CLEP, as it is recognised that the majority of the poor are women, so that women’s rights need to receive more attention, recommending that legal reform, legal aid, and legal literacy work to advance women’s legal empowerment.

The final report on a community-land titling initiative carried out by the International Development Law Organization (IDLO) a study in partnership with the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI) in Liberia, Centro Terro Viva (CTV) in Mozambique and The Land and Equity Movement in Uganda (LEMU), includes recommendations on how best to facilitate protections for women and other vulnerable groups’ rights during community land documentation efforts. Scheduling meetings at times and locations convenient for women and organising women only meetings were found to be important to promote women’s
participation and empower women to make their voices heard. More importantly, the analysis of this initiative showed very clearly that paralegal support is necessary to ensure that women participate meaningfully in community land documentation activities, in order for these to lead to improvements in women’s land rights.br />

A briefing note on lessons from pilot projects to promote the legal empowerment of rural women at the community level, carried out by members and partners of the International Land Coalition (ILC) in 4 countries, stresses the importance of targetting women for capacity-building, especially to strengthen women’s literacy skills and confidence to participate actively in the public sphere, often out of bonds for women. Producing information on laws and legal rights that is accessible to women, i.e. in local languages, non-legalistic language, through radio, videos, posters, theatre and songs, and cartoons) is also crucial to contribute to women’s legal empowerment.

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