Access, ownership, and control over land can provide women with financial security, shelter, income, and livelihood opportunities. Despite this, there remains a distinct lack of funding for such work and a dearth of structured interventions around women’s land rights (WLR) in India.

Through Womanity Foundation’s work in this arena, we’ve observed that women in rural India often approach the organisations embedded in their communities for support on a host of issues—domestic violence, access to government schemes, skilling, and so on. As a result, these community-based organisations also become the first port of call when women experience land rights issues. Unfortunately, many of them are unable to step in and provide adequate support. Some of the reasons for this are:

  • They lack the requisite technical skills and understanding of land laws and claims processes as well as proven strategies for intervention.
  • The laws and processes concerning land are constantly evolving. For example, the government’s drive towards digitisation has been challenging for a number of community-based organisations, which may not have the knowledge, confidence, and connectivity to engage with such online processes.
  • When looking at land rights, organisations also need to address the social and cultural challenges within the communities such as the complex, multi-layered factors of caste, class, gender, and political allyship, which lengthens the process.

In parallel, the WLR ecosystem requires robust data; extensive, action-based research; open-sourced assets; and collaboration platforms that bring together various stakeholders, including practitioners, academicians, researchers, land and gender experts, and government officials.

It is evident that the ecosystem needs to mature on various aspects. At the Womanity Foundation, we provide funding to various nonprofit partner organisations to implement land rights programmes on the ground. However, we also recognise the need for and importance of building awareness and technical capacity for a larger set of nonprofits and other organisations within the ecosystem. Towards this goal, one of our initiatives has been capacity building via a WLR course that is open to all nonprofits. Below, we outline our experience of conducting the course and how our learnings are informing our work.

Read the full article about women's access to land rights by Linzi Sarkar And Shivani Gupta at India Development Review.