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Home arrow News arrow Gender evaluation criteria for large-scale land tools

May 21st, 2012

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Gender evaluation criteria for large-scale land tools

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How can we judge if a land tool sis responsive to both women and men’s needs?

The relevance of gender and land: sharing and building capacity at WUF IV

Gender issues had a critical place in GLTN’s activities at WUF IV in Nanjing.  At the GLTN Roundtable—with the overarching theme of land governance—gender was recognized as one of the key elements required for any country striving for better governance of land, and a set of evaluation questions for judging whether a large-scale land tool is sufficiently responsive to both women and men’s needs was shared amongst partners. These gender evaluation criteria have been advanced by GLTN during 2007-2008 through two workshops held in collaboration with the Huairou Commission and the International Federation of Surveyors (FIG), and most recently through an e-forum on the topic, completed before WUF IV and still accessible for public viewing on www.gltn.net. While still in draft format, the evaluation questions attracted large attention with several WUF participants expressing interest in piloting the criteria in 2009.

To complement the GLTN Roundtable, two side-events were organized to specifically discuss with grassroots women their ideas around the above gender evaluation criteria and what up scaling of land tools means to them.  In terms of the former, grassroots women had, along with other stakeholder groups such as land professionals, actively participated in the e-forum.  Through this face-to-face event, issued around possible indicators to use, and how grassroots women could use these as specific entry points for change in their own work, was more thoroughly discussed in their terms and vocabulary.  The event reiterated the multiple usages that the gender evaluation criteria can have for different stakeholder groups.

The second side event unpacked a set of ideas proposed to GLTN so far in terms of criteria that should be considered when selecting land initiatives to be scaled up. Here, grassroots women voiced their thoughts on what aspect of their own initiatives, or those they know of, that they think make them work, in particular for women. They jointly analyzed what ingredients are necessary in these projects to potentially scale them up to reach more people—ranging from  how to maintain the ‘’core’’ of an initiative, how to get a initiative reach national policy levels, and how to ensure ownership by stakeholders.

At a post-WUF GLTN Training on Land for Habitat Programme Managers (HPMs), a full session was dedicated to gender, which actively engaged the participants. Plenary work drawing from their country experiences illustrated the need to look at gender issues when discussion land across all UN-HABITAT regions, both in terms of advancing research and using a gender lens in any work implementation.  A regular e-mail update on GLTN’s work on gender will be initiated to keep the HPMs abreast on information and tools that they can use for this aspect of their work.

In light of the exciting breakthroughs on gender within GLTN, it is timely that the International Federation of Women Lawyers (FIDA) is GLTN’s newest member. FIDA was officially welcomed to the Network at the GLTN Roundtable and discussions are underway on how this new partnership will be utilized as GLTN continues to advance gender-sensitivity as one of its core principles.

The above activities have all been done in close conjunction with the UN-HABITAT Gender Mainstreaming Unit.