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Two organisations discuss  increasing women’s access to land

Two organisations discuss increasing women’s access to land

The Network for Women's Rights in Ghana (NETRIGHT), in collaboration with Grassroots Sisterhood Foundation (GSR), has organised a forum in Tamale to discuss and share experiences on a project initiated by the two non-governmental organisations (NGOs) to increase rural women’s access to land for both agriculture and housing purposes in the Nanton Traditional Area in the Northern Region.

 

The project titled "Strengthening Rural Women's Livelihood Opportunities through Empowerment in Community Land Stewardship and Accountability in Agricultural Investments in Ghana" is to give rural women the voice to negotiate their own land tenure conditions, improve the institutional arrangements for customary land governance and bring about improvements in the documentation of land rights among others for policy attention.

The forum, which was organised with support from the International Institute for Environment and Development (IED), was also to share lessons and experiences from the Community Land Development Committees (CLDCs) that had been formed in some communities in the Nanton Traditional Area to bring women, youth and opinion leaders together to discuss and dialogue on issues relating to acquisition of land by women.

 Benefits

Some women who shared their experiences at the forum said the project had increased women's participation in issues relating to the acquisition and management of customary lands in their communities.

According to them, contrary to the situation in the past, a number of women in their communities now owned lands which they used for both agriculture and residential purposes.

"It has also boosted our confidence and our negotiation skills. Now I own a parcel of land to myself and the fear of the land being taken away from me by the chiefs has been removed since the land has been properly acquired and well documented", a participant in the forum, Adishetu Salifu, stated.

"Now we can also sit with our chiefs to discuss issues relating to the management and sale of lands in our communities which was not so in the previous past", Mamunatu Alhassan, another participant told this reporter.

 Challenges

However, some of the women at the forum expressed concern over the cumbersome process and the bureaucracies associated with the documentation processes for land acquisition at the Lands Commission anytime they went there to register and open a file on their land.

They, therefore, called on the Lands Commission to remove all the bottlenecks associated with the process to make land title registration easy for rural and poor women.

The Executive Director of  the GSR, Madam Fati Alhassan, in an interview, said the project sought to increase women's access to land and enhance their livelihoods through the proper acquisition of land, adding that women’s right to land ownership was very important since it provided them food security and positive livelihoods.

She expressed worry that many of the women, through the assistance of the NGO, have been able to acquire lands but had difficulties registering such properties due to bureaucratic bottlenecks.

Madam Alhassan, therefore, called on the Lands Commission to embark on more public education at the community level and collaborate with organisations working to promote land rights and food security at the community level, to address the challenges associated with the registration of land.

 The way forward

A member of the Steering Committee of NETRIGHT, Madam Chris Dadzie, for her part, said the forum was to collate views on the benefits and challenges of the project so as to engage with policy actors to discuss how to address the inherent challenges associated with the acquisition and registration of customary land.

The Northern Regional Director of the Department of Gender, Mr Patrick Seidu Saa, in an address, said even though there had been substantial improvement in the standard of living of women, many of them still lagged behind in economic ventures.

The Northern Region Population Officer, Chief Alhassan Amadu, who presided over the forum, expressed worry over the high illiteracy rate in the region, adding that majority of the illiterates were women and that tended to have serious consequences on child upbringing and on the entire society.

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