Women’s land tenure security project (WOLTS)

2023
Mokoro, Multi country

New WOLTS paper published 23 May 2023! Confident Gender and Land Champions – Building Critical Mass for Locally-Driven Change
This new WOLTS paper shares key findings from our most recent, dissemination-focused, phase. Read how WOLTS gender and land champions in Mongolia and Tanzania, men and women, developed their own stories and messages, and became empowered as confident actors for change and influential local advisors. Read also how the WOLTS approach – iteratively crafted over seven years of rigorous fieldwork and community engagement – strengthens cross-project learning, fosters local ownership, boosts participation and inclusivity in land governance, and challenges gendered social norms. As this paper recounts, impactful dissemination and capacity building takes time, but is very possible and results in sustainable change.

 

Two new WOLTS blogs by our Team Leader, Elizabeth Daley – “Scaling out and over time for more inclusive land governance”, available here, and “How WOLTS champions changed communities, and changed me – Building a sustainable model for women and community land rights”, available here in English and Mongolian.

Reflections on seven years of WOLTS in Mongolia and Tanzania – read our two newest blogs from our in-country partners:
“We had no idea what a learning journey it would be” – by Narangerel Yansanjav (available here in English and Mongolian)
“Gender and land champions can help” – by Joyce Ndakaru (available here in English and Kiswahili)

Read more of our recent WOLTS blogs!

– Protesting herders to get government support to stop harmful mining operations
– A sustainable future needs women and men working together for change
– “It will be fun to develop land-use planning, if we do it together”
– To secure equal rights to land, bring men and women together

 

WOLTS will be at LANDac 2023!
The WOLTS team will be presenting papers in two sessions at the 2023 Landac Conference. Look out for us in Panel 23 and at the Land-at-Scale Roundtable. More details to follow.

 

Read our WOLTS Champions Perspectives blog series! Written by pastoralists from Mongolia and Tanzania who have taken part in our gender and land champions training programme since 2018.

No.1 – “We now have the knowledge to control mining and save our livelihoods” – Read here.
No.2 – “Mongolia needs fewer cows for better pastureland” – Read here.
No.3 – “Unknowing abuse” – Read here.
No.4 – “So much has changed since I became a gender and land champion” – Read here.
No.5 – “People listen to me now” – Read here.
No.6 – “I am not afraid to speak up” – Read here.
No.7 – “People are hungry for this knowledge” – Read here.

 

The WOLTS Team at LANDac 2022 and Global Land Forum!

WOLTS team members Jim Grabham and Joyce Ndakaru attended the Global Land Forum in May 2022 to share WOLTS Project findings as part of the session on ‘Transforming gender relations for more equitable land rights. Jim and Joyce also presented at LANDac’s annual International Land Governance Conference at the end of June 2022. They joined the sessions ‘The Human Right to Land – do we need Human Rights based Land Governance and what could it deliver?’ and ‘Women’s Land Rights: What have we achieved and how to move forward?’ respectively.

 

New report published 16 June 2021 shares findings from WOLTS Stage 2:

Women and Community Land Rights – Investing in Local Champions

Check out the webinar recording and webinar report, including in MongolianKiswahili and French

 

WOLTS is Mokoro’s strategic and practical action-research project on gender and land.

For more than seven years, WOLTS has been working with local partners People Centered Conservation (PCC) in Mongolia and HakiMadini in Tanzania, investigating the intersection of gender and land relations in different mining-affected pastoralist contexts, and developing a methodology for long-term community engagement and capacity building to protect and support the land rights of all vulnerable people.

Employing a range of rigorous participatory fieldwork approaches, with multiple site visits to validate and triangulate data, the WOLTS project aims to strengthen the evidence base, collaborate with local and national stakeholders to identify ways to secure land rights, and support communities to withstand threats to their land and natural resources through a contextually-appropriate programme of training men and women community ‘champions’ on gender and land.

In Mongolia, the WOLTS team has also partnered with the government’s Agency for Land Administration and Management, Geodesy and Cartography (ALAMGAC) in the design of new technical guidance on gender to support participatory local land management planning. These ‘gender guidelines’ were designed to strengthen inclusivity within Mongolia’s existing public consultations process during medium-term soum (district) development planning, and have been shared with local land officers across Mongolia.

The ‘gender guidelines’ are available in English here and in Mongolian here. Read our WOLTS blog about them: ‘Gender guidelines to be distributed in all 330 districts of Mongolia – pilot study supports national roll-out of participatory land use planning’, available here.

 

Read our WOLTS Team Perspectives blog series:

No.1 – ‘Seats of power – women’s land rights and chairs’ is available here;
No.2 – ‘How role-play changed two Maasai communities’ is available here;
No.3 – ‘How Anna Letaiko got her land’ is available here;
No.4 – ‘Young champions – hope for Mongolia’s herding traditions’ is available here;
No.5 – ‘How COVID-19 is bringing Mongolia’s herding families back together’ is available here.

Read our Team Leader’s reflections on the impacts of our work to January 2020 – ‘Putting research into action – One muddy step at a time.’

You can read our first four WOLTS blogs from Mongolia hereherehere and here and a blog from Tanzania here. Check out our photo essay from Tanzania here, and our very first WOLTS article here.

To find out more about WOLTS Mongolia, related reports and documentation, please click here.
To find out more about WOLTS Tanzania, related reports and documentation, please click here.

Sign up to our general WOLTS mailing list here.

The people behind the project

Project leader: Elizabeth Daley

Principal Consultant

Researcher

Principal Consultant