Assessing Women’s Land Rights and Food Security in Kenya: Challenges and Opportunities
Patricia Kameri-Mbote, Muriuki Muriungi
Kenya has made important strides towards enhancing women’s land rights through the 2010 Constitution and the enactment of laws that seek to achieve gender equality. This is particularly important for livelihoods and food security in the country since studies indicate that secure land tenure for women directly contributes to improved food security. Studies also show that women’s resources are largely used to improve the well being of the family compared to those of men. This is partly attributable to the fact that women in the majority of families act as the nurturers and caretakers who are responsible for ensuring that their families are well fed. Insecure land tenure rights for women directly affects food security in instances where their access to land is negated by ownership regimes that often exclude them. Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 5 addresses gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls noting in particular, the fundamental role of women in achieving poverty reduction, food security and nutrition and the sustainable development goals. This has to be read together with SDG 1 whose aim is eradication of poverty. Poverty eradication in agrarian societies such as Kenya can only be achieved if women have secure rights to access and use land for both livelihood and economic activities. Such rights will facilitate both their economic empowerment and self-reliance, which will in turn impact on the family and contribute to poverty reduction. SDG Goal 4, which provides for quality education has a dual link to women’s empowerment. On the one hand, quality education for women is likely to contribute to their enhanced capacity to take their children to school. On the other hand, the Goal is likely to be met when women have secure land rights since they will have a source of income with which to put their children through school. Undoubtedly, the overall achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals 2015 are largely predicated on whether women’s rights to productive resources such as land are secured in law, not only in Kenya but in the whole of developing economies. According to an assessment of the progress of women’s land rights in Kenya’s legal framework in 2017 commissioned by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), the country appears to have done well in a few aspects while it has performed dismally in others. On the positive side, Kenya has enacted a law mandating the inclusion of women in land management and land administration institutions. The study also found that the legal framework protects women’s land rights even under customary tenure holding in its recognition of customary land holding. This is hardly surprising considering the robust equality provisions in Kenya’s Constitution. However, the assessment unearthed unsettling facts noting that contrary to the widely held view, Kenya is not faring well on various aspects regarding women’s land rights; and this has implications on the food security question in the country. For instance, the study noted that there is neither a law mandating the joint titling or registration of land as between men and women in marriage unions and there are no economic incentives to encourage such joint titling in the law. This has to be viewed with the context of research showing that women title-holders constitute a negligible proportion of total private titleholders despite women being the ones who provide the bulk of labour for agriculture. The assessment further found that while there is a legal requirement for spousal consent in land transactions such as charging or selling, there is not enough legal protection afforded to women living in cohabitation arrangements (de facto couples) since cohabitation is not recognised in formal law. This is significant because of the ubiquity of cohabitation particularly in urban centres. Further in light of the fact that under most customary laws marriage is a process that takes time and not a one off...
Event: Land Governance in an Interconnected World_Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty_2018
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