Access to & Control of Resources

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Resources are critical to people’s identities and livelihoods and to advance autonomy, agency, and rights. Yet, historically, due to gendered divisions of labour, patriarchal cultural norms and laws and economic inequalities, women in all their diversity have been denied access to resources such as education, health services, credit, land and technologies. Assessment of access to and control of resources has been a fundamental tool of gender analysis. But in the face of the ‘race for resources’, including the intensifying pressures on land, so-called land grabs in many countries of the global south and the predicted wars for access to basics such as water, there is a need for new tools and strategies. Land reform and redistribution, especially in post-colonial contexts, remain unfinished business.

What strategies are women’s movements and other allied movements such as indigenous peoples, migrant rights, landless peoples, smallholder and peasant farmers, and disability rights movements using to advance equal access to and distribution of resources?  How are women contributing to resource struggles through, for example, food sovereignty demands and campaigns against land grabs? What have we learned from the significant focus and resources given to initiatives on women’s access to credit, including microcredit? What other economic alternatives are women building, from the grassroots to the international level, to transform unequal access to and control over resources?

Related Resources

  1. Women in Agriculture: Closing the Gender Gap for Development, FAO, 2011
  2. The Great Food Crisis of 2011, Foreign Policy, January 2011
  3. Agriculture Policy is Gender Policy, March 2011
  4. The Oil-Food Price Shock, The Nation, March 2011
  5. The Impact of the Global Land Rush (LANDESA) on women
  6. Strategies to get Gender onto the Agenda of the “Land Grab” debate, The Land Coalition, March 2011
  7. VIDEO: Colombia: Wayuu Gold, Fighting for Access to Fresh Water
  8. Women and Energy Access, Impact on Sustainable Development and Livelihoods, 2011
  9. State of Food Insecurity in the World, WEDO, 2011
  10. Speculation on Commodities Futures Markets and Destabilization of Global Food Prices: Exploring the Connections, Jayati Ghosh, James Heintz , Robert Pollin, October 2011
  11. VIDEO: Jayati Ghosh speaks about Land and Water Grabbing
  12. VIDEO: Food Crisis and Land Grab documentary
  13. Common Land and Women’s Rights, June 2011
  14. The Right to Food, Gender Equality and Economic Policy
  15. VIDEO: The Right to Food, Gender Equality and Economic Policy 
  16. Africa’s Latest Land Rush: The Effect Of Land Grabs On Women’s Rights
  17. Food Insecurity and the Energy Crisis Result in Grabbing Land from Women
  18. A podcast Interview with Peace Musiimenta (from Uganda) about women and property rights
  19. A Photo Essay on “Growing Debt” in India (widows inheriting debt due to farmer suicides in India)
  20. How can women’s land rights be secured? , Land Portal
  21. Sharing information and interacting with people and organizations concerned with gender and land, Land Portal
  22. Without women there is no food sovereignty
  23. TGNP Report-Food Sovereignty
  24. In search of Economic Alternatives for Gender and Social Justice: voices from India
  25. AID POLICY: Big is not always best among the donors
  26. The changing face of pastoralism
  27. Divorced women gain rights to property under new Indian law
  28. Land Rights and Food security

Related AWID Publications

Feminist Perspectives Towards Transforming Economic Power: Topic 1 Food Sovereignty

The Feminist Perspectives Towards Transforming Economic Power: Topic 3: Buen Vivir

Fact And Fiction: Examining Microcredit/Microfinance From A Feminist Perspective

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