The Global Center for Women’s Land Rights is an initiative of the Rural Development

The Global Center for Women’s Land Rights is an initiative of the Rural Development Institute created to help ensure that throughout the world, women, as well as men, have secure rights to land that are both legally and socially recognized.
A Better Future for Women and Girls
Providing secure land rights to women isn’t just a good idea—it is essential to addressing poverty and hunger. When women have secure rights to the land they farm:

Family nutrition and food security improves,
Women are less likely to contract and spread HIV/AIDS,
Domestic violence rates are lower, and
Children are more likely to get education, and
Women have better access to micro-credit, improving family income.
In short, investing in women’s land rights creates a ripple effect that spreads to her family, village and entire region.

The Challenge
Unfortunately, only 2% of landowners are women. In many developing countries, women cannot own property … women are property.

In addition, there are not enough people in the world working to improve women’s legal rights to land. Those that do are often isolated and unable to share information and resources with one another.

A United Vision
To address these challenges and help meet the Millennium Development Goals to end poverty and hunger and to improve women’s empowerment, RDI created the Global Center for Women’s Land Rights in 2009. Based in Seattle, the Center will catalyze the global community around this issue and will allow practitioners, scholars and others to share resources, strategies and interventions with one another and collaborate on shared solutions.

Our Partners
RDI’s commitment to create the Global Center for Women’s Land Rights was highlighted by former President Bill Clinton at the Clinton Global Initiative. RDI’s work to secure land rights for women and girls is funded in part by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Omidyar Network and the Nike Foundation.

The Initiatives of the Global Center for Women’s Land Rights
For over a decade, RDI has led programs and partnerships with developing country governments to strengthen the property rights of women through our Women and Land Program. RDI’s Global Center for Women’s Land Rights will help deepen this work in addition to creating several new initiatives:

Global Fellowship and Visiting Scholars Program
RDI is developing fellowship and training opportunities for qualified professionals seeking to pursue a career in helping to secure land and property rights for women and girls. The program will provide opportunities for legal professionals in the U.S., experienced legal professionals in developing countries who could benefit from comparative experience, and experienced non-legal professionals from NGOs who seek comparative legal knowledge. The Center will also provide a short-term program for Visiting Scholars (two months) from NGOs and other sectors.

e-Library on Women’s Property Rights
RDI is creating an “e-library” that will make legislation concerning women’s property rights throughout the world widely accessible. The e-Library on women’s property rights will be an open-source platform, allowing users to share and post laws and related materials on how those laws are practiced thorough a discussion forum. The e-Library will be cross-referenced via topics (widows' rights, dowry, girls’ inheritance, etc.) as well as by countries and regions in a variety of languages.

Lifting our Voices: Advocacy and Education
To address the “knowledge deficit” among governments, donors, and policymakers about the importance of secure land rights for women, we must lift our voices. Through events, training workshops, forums and policy briefings with NGOs, donors and policymakers, we will work to help get the message out: secure land rights for women and girls changes lives and change societies.