This interview with Aslihan Kes, USAID/REFS, is part of USAID’s Land and Resource Governance Division’s Women’s Land Rights Champions series, which profiles staff across USAID Missions and operating units who are working to advance women’s land rights.
Tell us about yourself
I am a Senior Gender Advisor with the USAID Bureau for Resilience, Environment and Food Security (REFS). I have been with USAID for about 6 years. Before joining the Agency, for over a decade, I worked at the International Center for Research on Women, last as a Senior Economist. That is where I first started working on women’s land and property rights as a key priority not only for increasing women’s economic security and wellbeing, but also for increasing their empowerment across many spheres of their lives. One of the first research projects I worked on explored the linkages between women’s land tenure security, access to housing, and human health and well-being in South Africa and Uganda. In this work, we explored the impact of secure land and property on women’s ability to protect themselves from HIV and reduce gender-based violence (GBV). Together with colleagues, I also developed one of the early survey instruments to better understand and measure women’s rights to land and assets. The tool helped analyze relationships between different types of land ownership and women’s perceptions of longer-term security of their land and assets and ability to make decisions over their land and assets. Finally, I had the privilege to work with grassroots organizations across East Africa and support the development of paralegal programs that raised awareness about women’s land rights, supported community-level conflict resolution, and enhanced women’s access to justice.
Why are women’s land rights and resource governance important to your work? And to other USAID development work?
At USAID, REFS coordinates the Agency’s efforts to promote food security and improved nutrition, access to safe water, a healthy environment, and improved livelihoods for all. We can achieve these goals only with women at the center of our efforts; when women have the tools to succeed and when they are empowered to chart a course for themselves and their families. And women’s land rights and resource governance are fundamental for driving equity and empowering women.
The latest (2023) FAO report on the Status of Women in Agrifood Systems synthesizes the most recent gender data and evidence from the agricultural sector and reinforces a key message that there are significant economic and social costs to persistent gender inequities in agrifood systems—a sector in which women contribute significant labor and rely more heavily on for their livelihoods.
One of the key inequities the report underscores is land ownership. Despite progress in some areas, women’s tenure security over agricultural land continues to lag behind that of men. All the while we have an ever-growing evidence base that clearly lays out the case for secure rights over land because they incentivize women—and men—to invest in their land to make it more productive and to be more resilient. Land as collateral remains the more common way for women and men to access financing for their investments both on and off the farm. In fact, the ImpAct Review that was done by the USAID Office of Chief Economist last year lists formalizing women’s land rights and expanding co-titling as meaningful interventions for increasing women’s agricultural income. And finally, as summarized in the same FAO report, there is a large body of evidence that highlights the positive linkages between women’s land rights and improved bargaining power, human capital investment and intergenerational transfers, just to name a few. In other words, the ripple effects of securing women’s land rights can set a foundation for generating positive outcomes from much of the work that we do at USAID.
At this point, the question is not “why” it is important to ensure that women have tenure security over land and a voice in their natural resource governance, but “how” to advance these through programs and policies.
What are some of the biggest challenges in helping women secure land rights and what are some things being done to overcome them?
While it is encouraging to see that more countries have undertaken legal and policy reforms that promote and protect women’s equal rights to land, there continue to be significant implementation and enforcement challenges. This has to do with the limited capacity and resources of institutions to effectively implement policies but also with the tension that often exists between the laws on the one hand and social norms governing land ownership on the other.
I think the way we can tackle this complex challenge is through programs that pursue multi-pronged approaches that address both demand and supply. For example, it is important to build the capacity of institutions to design and implement gender responsive land policies, raise awareness about women’s legal land rights, and engage with men and community leaders in meaningful dialogue to tackle long standing norms that might prevent equitable and inclusive land ownership.
For the last couple of years, through the U.S. Government’s Gender Equity and Equality Action (GEEA) Fund, managed by USAID’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Hub (GenDev) and implemented by USAID and the Department of State, USAID has been supporting African Women in Agricultural Research and Development (AWARD) to implement the Gender Responsive Agriculture Systems Policy (GRASP) fellowship program. GRASP invests in building the leadership of women in food systems policy in Africa and is currently working with about 100 women fellows from 12 countries across the African continent. These fellows and the mentors and mentees they work with—300 changemakers in total—are working to ensure agricultural policies and their implementation, including around land and natural resource management, are more gender responsive. I think this is a great example of how we can make inroads to transforming agrifood systems with women as leaders driving the change.
As a donor, it is also important that we set clear targets and direct resources toward programs that will help us achieve those targets. Last year, USAID announced Generating Resilience and Opportunities for Women (GROW), which is a commitment to more than double USAID’s investments in Fiscal Year 2023 funds to advance gender priorities in agrifood, water, and climate adaptation programming to reach $335 million. Today, some 17 months later, USAID has actually exceeded the GROW commitment by $114 million to reach a total of $449 million in investment.
GROW is enabling USAID to deepen and scale the impact of our programs that support women on and off their farms. One of the targets that USAID has set under GROW is that 150,000 women will be provided with legally recognized and documented tenure rights to land or marine areas by FY 2025.
This target will help us stay the course and stay accountable to this important priority.
What are some of USAID’s successes in the area of women’s land rights?
There are some successes in this space achieved through awareness raising and capacity building as well as innovative models such as the Mapping Approaches for Securing Tenure (MAST), which USAID and partners use to support local communities to document, manage and secure their land and resource rights.
There are also some promising results that came out of intentionally embedding women’s access to land and tenure security as a priority within USAID’s agricultural value chain activities. For example, the Advance II activity in Northern Ghana tapped into the existing outgrower business networks to promote women farmers’ access to land. With support from the Activity, the outgrower business owners, who saw a strong business case for working with women farmers, organized community sensitization meetings with male landlords, chiefs, husbands and women leaders in the community and advocated for land access for women farmers. At the same time, the Activity supported locally led research that helped them more effectively advocate on this critical issue. The research revealed the significant productivity losses that are caused by women farmers’ lack of easy access to land, and helped secure commitments from traditional leaders and landowners to extend land tenure rights to women; rights that were documented through a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU).