Introduction and Background
The USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program in Zambia held two webinars on women’s land rights in July 2021. The webinars brought together academia, practitioners and the government, with the goal of facilitating dialogue between government and communities of practice on the issue of women’s land and property rights. The webinars covered current opportunities and challenges in securing women’s land tenure and property rights in Zambia, and lessons learned for future efforts.
The webinar series on women’s land rights grew out of ongoing work by USAID through the Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program in Zambia, which supports gender responsive community land documentation efforts. The objectives for the webinars were to:
- Offer a platform for practitioners to learn and exchange ideas on women’s land rights in the Zambian context;
- Identify best practices to address barriers to women’s land access and ownership rights and add to the body of local knowledge on gender and land;
- Discuss the challenges and opportunities for increasing women’s rights in land documentation; and
- Offer opportunities for collaboration and networking to promote greater gender equality in land and natural resources management.
Each two-hour webinar featured four presentations and a question-and-answer session. An average of 66 participants from academia, civil society, community groups, traditional leaders, cooperating partners, and government departments attended each session.
This report summarizes the presentations and discussion from the various women’s land rights webinar sessions. Full recordings of the sessions can be found on YouTube.