Vision of Change

The Land and Housing Campaign emerged as a response to the work of grassroots women’s organizations in securing tenure for women, reversing evictions, securing titles, curbing disinheritance and fighting discriminatory land tenure policies. 

The Land and Housing Campaign aims to transform dominant social, political and cultural perceptions and practices that hinder or deny women’s access, control and ownership of land and property.  These perceptions and practices suppress the critical roles that women play in development, production and management.  We prioritize the importance of women’s roles in decision making over land at the household, local, national and international levels. 

The Land and Housing Campaign seeks to:

• Increase voice and visibility of women so they can CLAIM land and housing
• Facilitate opportunities for knowledge building and sharing to encourage grassroots women to GAIN land and housing
• Enhance the capacity of grassroots women to hold stakeholders accountable and to increase grassroots women’s participation in decision making in order to MAINTAIN their land and housing

The Land and Housing Campaign supports Peer Exchanges and Grassroots Academies and facilitates women’s voices to be heard in larger international forums such as the World Urban Forum. The Campaign also supports groups to map best practices in land and housing. The successful work of grassroots member groups gets promoted and linked to larger institutions and other partners to increase the influence of the groups. 

The Campaign invests in local and national efforts to increase grassroots women’s voice and visibility through Local-to-Local Dialogues and national level Land Summits.  The Local-to-Local Dialogue is a process grassroots women’s groups use to engage with and develop partnerships with local authorities.  For more information, see the Local to Local Dialogue page. The Land and Housing Campaign strengthens women’s enjoyment of their human right to housing and land  by supporting grassroots women’s groups to better access relevant human rights instruments, laws and policies.

We have built partnerships with the Global Land Tool Network (www.gltn.net), an initiative of the United Nations Human Settlements Program (UN HABITAT).  We also partner with academic organizations such as the Institute of Housing Studies in the Netherlands, research groups such as Landesa Rural Development Institute, and other UN agencies such as UNDP, Open Society Institute, the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), UNDP HIV/AIDS Team and a number of other key stakeholders work with the Campaign to further address the linkages between HIV/AIDS and land for women. 

At the regional level in Latin America, groups are supported through the Regional CORDAID fund for land and housing activities.  The groups carrying out mapping of their land and housing assets and vulnerabilities, using the mapping process as a tool to build a local knowledge base of their situation.  Using their collective knowledge and maps, they do workshops to strengthen their legal knowledge and then advocate with the government to promote local and national policies and laws to get land in the hands of women.

In Africa, the Land and Housing Campaign is carried out through Women’s Land Link Africa (WLLA) (link to the WLLA subpage in L&H campaign), a joint regional partnership initiative that the Huairou Commission developed in 2004 together with the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), UNHABITAT and the UN Food and Agriculture Organization. It is currently coordinated by the Huairou Commission in partnership with COHRE, funded by SIDA and an Anonymous donor and is the platform on land for over 25 women’s groups from around Africa. WLLA largely provides seed funding to member groups to enhance existing land and housing practices and share practices through Land Academies, workshops and exchanges. WLLA also serves as an advocacy platform for grassroots women leaders to carry a collective message on African women in land and housing, supporting members to regional and international policy and networking events.

Envisioned Impact

We envision a world where:

• Grassroots women leaders hold visible and influential roles in land debates at national, regional and international levels.  
• Institutions and academics working on land and housing will recognize the importance of women’s access to, control over and ownership of land, and they will link with, recognize and involve grassroots women’s groups as critical to development on land and housing.
• Grassroots women’s strategies to promote inheritance rights link more closely their HIV/AIDS mitigation mechanisms. 
• At the community level, more women are knowledgeable of their land and housing rights and are empowered and organized to fight for them.  More women are able to negotiate with local authorities for land, and more women actively protect their own land rights with practices that get results.
• As women secure access to land and housing, whole communities will become more resilient and able to advance sustainable development.