By Reem Gaafar*
At the time
of its writing, the U.S.
Constitution did not define who was eligible to vote. Each state
was given the authority to determine eligibility. In most states, access to the
ballot box was reserved for white males who owned at least 50 acres of land or
had taxable income. This is a great example of how property ownership functions as a
gateway right. In this case, those without property rights did not have
political rights.
Today, land rights remain a gateway right in much of the world.
Consider the plight of the landless poor in India. An estimated 20 million rural families—children, women, and
men—across India are landless. First and foremost, their landlessness traps them in poverty. They
lack the most important asset in a rural society – land. Without secure land
rights, they don’t have the security, opportunity or incentive to make the sort
of long-term investments in their land that can improve their harvests and
their income. What’s more, their landlessness means that they often do not
appear in any government records – making them ineligible for a wide variety government
services. In fact, often they cannot even access the government services
created specifically to help the poor.
Government programs such as free boarding school (available for poor
high school students from tribal families), government work cards (that
guarantee 100 days of paid work each year), agricultural extension services
(that might boost their harvests and nutrition), and funds for the homeless to
build a home – often require proof of residence.
As explained in an Institute
for Human Rights in Business paper by
Elisabeth Wickeri and Anil Kalhan, “Access to land is important for development
and poverty reduction, but also often necessary for access to numerous
economic, social and cultural rights, and as a gateway for many civil and
political rights.”
A wealth of research has made clear that
secure land rights are critically important in both rural and urban settings, impacting
access to economic, social, and cultural rights including: income, food,
utilities, housing, credit, government services, and household – and
community-level decision-making. The impact is particularly compelling for women,
who see a variety of positive outcomes with secure land tenure including
greater savings and income and reduction in the rate of domestic violence.
Given all of these linkages, it is clear that land rights have been
an underutilized leverage point in the international development community.
But a new trend – large scale
land acquisitions, popularly called “land grabs” – is shining a spotlight
on the fundamental importance of secure rights to land and helping ensure the
issue of land rights gets the attention it deserves as a global development
tool.
As Widkeri and Kalhan point out in their paper, “Forced evictions,
particularly those carried out through violence or coercion, tend to intensify
violations of interrelated rights, including the right to water and the right
to health, and can also lead to increased social inequality, social conflict,
and segregation. Forced evictions from land, whether in rural or urban areas,
therefore tie land access to a number of underlying human rights.”
A growing number of countries are making progress on improving land
rights for women and men.
Kenya’s new constitution, approved by voters in 2010, provides women
with unprecedented rights to land. Rwanda has provided farmers with
documentation of their land rights. Uganda is rolling out a new land policy
aimed at improving land tenure security. Tanzania is considering a new
constitution that protects women’s rights to own and inherit land. India,
having passed laws to provide women with equal inheritance rights, now has a
variety of programs aimed at improving land rights for the poor and women in
particular. And the list goes on.
As
policymakers and non-state actors continue efforts to address generational
poverty, it is imperative that the central role of secure land rights in
poverty alleviation efforts is not overlooked. Secure
rights to land can help us reach a broad array of development goals and are
critical to ensuring that the world’s poorest women and men have an effective
means of climbing out of poverty.
*Reem
Gaafar graduated from the Georgetown University Law Center in 2001. She is an
attorney and land tenure specialist with Landesa, a global development non-profit that works to
secure land rights for the world’s poor women and men. Ms. Gaafar’s work
focuses on strengthening the land and natural resource rights of smallholder
farmers, particularly women, in Africa.
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