Strategies & Tools
The Huairou Commission's Land & Housing Campaign seeks to broaden the outreach of its existing work and to strengthen the impact of
grassroots women's strategies. The HC recognizes that empowering women working at the grassroots is essential to increasing poor women's access to land,
housing and property. As such, we are focused on grassroots women as the initiators of actions and the problem solvers within their communities,
rather than as the recipients of legal or financial aid.
The HC has played an important role as a core partner in strengthening already existing efforts on advocacy for law, policy reform, and implementation; supporting information dissemination and exchanges on best practices; and developing tools and strategies towards the achievement of women's equal rights to land, housing and property. Since 2003, grassroots women have been mapping tenure systems, entering into new partnerships, exchanging their strategies and practices, and creating new national and regional networks. Despite these advances, there is a need to intensify and strengthen the impact of grassroots women's tools and strategies. In particular, the HC is focused on linking grassroots women's groups with each other nationally, regionally, and globally in order to increase women's collective power.
Although the Huairou Commission has supported and strengthened women's work on the ground there is a need to improve outcomes for women by scaling up documentation and exchange opportunities around successful practices that have reduced women's displacement and allowed women to claim their property and inheritance rights. In order to improve the outcomes for women the Huairou Commission will continue to work with grassroots women's groups to transfer effective strategies, skills and knowledge.
Below are a few examples of the innovative strategies and tools that grassroots women are undertaking for women to claim, gain, and maintain land and housing.
- Watchdog Groups:
A Tool for Safeguarding Women's Access and Co ntrol over Land & Property
- Community Mapping:
A Tool for Engendering Community Change
- Local-to-Local Dialogues:
A Tool for Engendering Local Governance
- Peer Exchanges:
Tools for Transfer of Grassroots Innovations, Knowledge and Skills
- Community-led Paralegal Processes:
Enhancing the Capacity of Grassroots Women to Access Legal Systems
- Grassroots Resource Mobilization and Economic Empowerment
- Building Women's Information, Knowledge and Communication Capacities
Eviction Watch Programs
Settlers work together to form Eviction Watch Programs that protect family members, friends and neighbors from eviction by local authorities. Lumanti Support Group for Shelter works to improve living conditions of the urban poor in Nepal and organizes eviction watch programs in urban areas where settlers are threatened with eviction.
Training Programs Foster Micro-enterprises
Estrategia, based in Lima, Peru, defends women's land tenure rights, especially in informal settlements, and has administered trainings to women's groups to produce building materials out of concrete including blocks, roofs, steps, beams and paving stones. Following these trainings, women started their own micro-enterprises, selling building materials to other neighborhoods in Lima. These enterprises created work opportunities and enabled women and men to build decent housing and community facilities.
Watchdog Groups
GROOTS Kenya developed Watchdog Groups, a systematic, community-based tool that safeguards the land and property rights of women, orphans and vulnerable children. Watchdog Groups provide institutional and participatory protection to prevent property-grabbing, monitor and report on cases of property dispossession and stop evictions. They have also served as an advocacy platform for grassroots women to access governance institutions and influence legal structures.
Savings and Credit Cooperatives
Pragati Mahila Uthan Saving & Credit Cooperative represents squatter women of the Kathmandu Municipality in Nepal and is working to reduce women's dependency on moneylenders. The cooperative provides women with access to and control over financial resources and more than 350 members have taken loans for various income generating activities.
Lobbying & Advocacy
The Uganda Land Alliance lobbies and advocates for women's land rights and co-ownership of family land; issues for inclusion in the National Land Policy; amendments of specific sections of the Land Act 1998; and reform/revision of other legislation on land to conform with the Land Act.
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