The Land and Housing Campaign works toward a world where women can autonomously and securely claim, gain and maintain land, housing and property, as a means of empowerment and as a foundation for sustainable, resilient community development.

The Land and Housing Campaign supports grassroots groups in a number of areas, including community based adjudication of land and housing disputes, anti eviction and anti property grabbing strategies, research and monitoring of land systems (including land reform, management, administration, markets), women’s response to land titles, through research and advocacy, gender budgeting around land and advocating for provision of key basic services.

Community Mapping

To better understand their and their communities situations, grassroots women’s groups engage in Community Mapping, identifying insecure tenure, the reasons for it and its effects.

Espaço Feminista, “Feminist Space,” based in Recife, Pernambuco in Northeastern Brazil conducted a training workshop for 30 grassroots women from the landless and rights to housing social movements. Then, they did a community mapping of Santo Amaro, one of the largest urban slums in Brazil. The grassroots women designed research tools and conducted and analyzed their data.  Through the mapping, they realized that women’s lack of land and housing ownership was seriously constraining their livelihood opportunities. They took their research results to their local municipalities, using the Local to Local Dialogue Process and educating local authorities, public administrators and researchers about the importance of land ownership and housing for women. As a result, they built alliances and partnerships, strengthening  their capacity to advocate successfully at the local and state level.

In a mapping process in Uganda, Slum Women’s Initiative for Development (SWID) leaders and the grassroots leaders they work with identified an overwhelming amount of corruption in land distribution and widespread denial of women’s rights to land. This finding motivated SWID to establish a women’s savings club and rotating loan schemes so that grassroots women can make housing mortgage payments and establish credit with banks. Many women can now to purchase land and access land titles, develop their land, and reduce their economic dependence on men.  The organization places more priority on capacity building and awareness raising on women’s land rights. 

The Comité de Emergencia Garifuna de Honduras has active grassroots groups in over 16 rural communities of the Garifuna ethnic group.  They trained sixty local leaders on Honduran land and housing laws, who then went back to their communities and trained additional people on it, forming a core group of local experts.  The women were prioritized within the process, and they became a source of information about communal land and the number of families that lack housing.  Their new leadership and knowledge improved their ability to advocate with local and national authorities.

Watchdog Groups

Where formal legal systems fail to secure tenure for women, grassroots women across Africa have developed non-judicial interventions to secure land and housing such as Watchdog Groups(link to Watchdog Groups) and community paralegals. 

Grassroots women caregivers, networked through GROOTS Kenya, noticed an increasing number of women being evicted after the deaths of their husbands. These caregivers came together to discuss the issues, and with the facilitation of GROOTS Kenya leaders, organized a response: the Community WatchDog group. These “watchdog” groups help defend women from evictions from their land, particularly after the death of their husbands, and often in relation to the spread of HIV/AIDS. The groups are made up of women, men, chiefs, elders and other leaders in the community. They organize dialogues with provincial administrators and successfully protect women’s property rights. Other women’s groups have replicated the watchdog groups in their communities and provincial administrators now interact more freely with community members around eviction issues.

Local to Local Dialogues

Grassroots women engage with local officials on matters of land and housing rights through a process called Local to Local Dialogue.

With little power over land and property and lack of sufficient information, women’s voices in Maasai communities are often  muffled or silenced on the topic of land rights, and they are often unable to make decisions or choices about their control over land. Massai Women Development Organization (MWEDO) successfully utilized Local to Local Dialogues in Simanjiro and Longido districts to engage local leaders and empower Maasai women. The dialogues cultivate a deeper understanding of the issues of access to and control over land women face within the pastoralist Maasai community. MWEDO leaders also engage community women in political processes.  As a result, local authorities  facilitated the granting of land to Maasai women through the Village Land Act.  Local leaders granted land tenure letters to over 250 women in Longido, effectively guaranteeing their control over land.. Traditional authorities also agreed to enforce new community agreements, such as abandoning traditional customs and practices that deny Maasai women’s public participation and access to property. 

Grassroots Assemblies

Grassroots Assemblies are grassroots women led community meetings that surface their needs and concerns around land.

In Peru, Mujeres Unidas Para un Pueblo Mejor and Estrategia conducted Grassroots Assemblies to bring women together to share their concerns about eviction, lack of household decision making and other housing and land related concerns distinctive to women. Assemblies offered women  the space to share these concerns and needs, and collectively think of innovative strategies to address them.

Other forms of participatory mapping carried out by GROOTS Peru, a coalition of grassroots women’s groups including CONAMOVIDI (a network of women’s popular kitchens), La Central de Bancos Comunales del Augustino y Santa Anita (a network of communal banks), Red de Mujeres de Lima Este, Mujeres Unidas para un Pueblo Mejor and Servicios Educativos del Augustino (SEA) also helped to identify risks and vulnerabilities in communities around Lima.  For example, in one community, women spoke of how the paths leading to the community, situated on a hillside, are impassable in the rainy season and are prone to flooding.

Land Academies

Groups in Africa have been coming together annually for the last several years to learn from each other and develop a common platform on land for Africa, in Women's Land Link Africa (WLLA) Annual Land Academies.  They use the methodology of the Grassroots Academy to bring together grassroots women leaders from the region to share their effective practices, learn from each other and discuss policy implications.

South East Asian Regional Work:  Groups in South East Asia have been coming together sub-regionally on the issue of eviction, surfacing the vital roles that community women play in fighting against eviction and for proper relocation.

In the Philippines, various grassroots organizations such as DAMPA and the Grassroots Women’s Empowerment Centre (GWEC) organize community members that are threatened with eviction to negotiate with governments for relocation or other solutions.  GWEC worked with the Philippines National Railway lines, threatened with eviction due to railway expansion. Through the women’s sustained pressure and negotiations with government, several communities now have received alternative land and new, secure homes.