Gender and ‘Land Grabbing’ in Sub-Saharan Africa: Women's land rights and customary land tenure

Abstract

Jessica Chu seeks to enquire into the understanding of gender impacts with the new proliferation of cross-border, large-scale land transactions or global ‘land grabs’. There has been a lack of discussion of gender in considering land grabs, most notably in the World Bank's recent report and in the various proposed guidelines. However, by not having addressed the current debates on women's land rights, particularly in regard to the return of customary law, current proposed solutions will fail to address the gender inequalities propagated by the land grabs.