Huairou Commission Holds Second Annual Grassroots Women’s Land Academy

	Fati Al Hassan of Grassroots Sisterhood Foundation addresses community leaders of Old Fadama during a site visit at the Land Academy.

April 1, 2009|Accra, Ghana

Grassroots women have made significant accomplishments in improving women's access to land and housing in their communities, as part of the Land & Housing Campaign's Women's Land Link Africa (WLLA) joint regional partnership initiative.These accomplishments were shared from March 23rd to March 27th 2009 during the Grassroots Women's Land Academy, held in Accra, Ghana. The Land Academy used the methods of experience-sharing and peer learning to look at the positive impacts they have had in grassroots communities across Sub-Saharan Africa.
 
Last week the Huairou Commission (HC), in collaboration with the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE), People's Dialogue, the Ghana Federation for the Urban Poor and Ghana Sisterhood Foundation, coordinated the second annual Grassroots Women's Land Academy in Accra. The Land Academy hosted 45 women and 3 men from 33 organizations, and fourteen countries including Benin, Burundi, Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Participating members and partners included grassroots community organizations, NGOs, and institutional partners.
 
During the Land Academy, WLLA partners shared the obstacles that grassroots women face in trying to access land and housing, as well as the innovative and successful strategies they have used to address those obstacles. Participants presented their successes with community organizing, negotiations and partnerships, building women's information, knowledge and communication capacities, resource mobilization, economic empowerment, advocacy and partnership building, all during the first two days.
 
On the third day of the Academy, participants held in-depth discussions on community-led legal strategies, with a focus on the process of training and working with Community Paralegals. During an interactive session participants gave input into the WLLA Community Paralegal Framework that has been developed as a result of deliberations by grassroots women leaders. With input from Land and Housing Campaign members of the WLLA initiative, the Huairou Commission plans to launch a How-to Handbook on Community Paralegalism in 2009.
 
In addition, a strong focus of this year's Land Academy was on building capacity on monitoring and evaluation. The women focused on developing goals, objectives and indicators to measure achievements of community-based work in several of the sessions. A heated and rigorous debate took place on the merits and challenges of carrying out monitoring and evaluation in their communities. Each group then developed their 2009 activity plans and drafted a set of indicators to measure their impact and success.
 
Participants concluded the Land Academy by planning the way forward for the WLLA initiative and sub-regional communication strategies. They planned strengthening strategies for the WLLA initiative in the coming years, as well as activities and future partnerships for WLLA members sub-regionally. Sub-regional focal points for communication between grassroots women's groups were selected to foster increased development of communications between grassroots women's organizations.
 
The Grassroots Women's Land Academy was a great success, highlighting that grassroots women are truly empowering each other by making inroads for women's access and control over land and housing throughout Africa.      

For more information please contact nicole.ganzekaufer@huairou.org