Urbanization can threaten women’s land access by swallowing up their farmland, pricing them out due to speculation and generating conflict.
This was among the conclusions from the baseline Political Economy Assessment (PEA) conducted by the USAID Improving Land Access for Women (ILAW) project in 2021.
But two years later, ILAW is seeing new opportunities for women to access urban land thanks to the project’s focus on changing social norms among customary and government land administrators in both urban and peri-urban contexts.
Following gender sensitivity trainings and over 200 social dialogue sessions, many of these leaders are actively lifting structural barriers and seizing opportunities for women to become landowners.
At a recent forum organized by ILAW, regional directors of urban land described how they convince landowning families to reserve plots for women during the creation of new urban subdivisions.