Land governance stakeholders have convened in Lilongwe, Malawi to review an assessment study of the gaps in land administration institutions, capacity and training needs. Organised by the Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), the workshop aims to facilitate a collaborative discussion on challenges and gaps or inadequacies in the policy, legal and institutional frameworks governing women's land tenure security, and gender-responsive land governance.

The validation of the study will be followed by a high-level Policy Dialogue aimed at creating a multi-stakeholder platform to deliberate on women’s land tenure security, and gender-responsive land governance and look into policy and legal issues affecting women’s land rights and tenure security. It will also be an opportunity to secure necessary input into a policy brief that clearly shows the government’s pathways towards implementing gender-responsive land governance and also draft a strategy, action plan and roadmap to ensure that women’s land rights issues are addressed.

The workshop is taking place against the backdrop of commitments by the Government of Malawi to implement the AU Declaration on Land Issues and Challenges in Africa. This aligns with the AU Declaration on land, which calls on the AU Member States to review their land sectors and develop comprehensive policies to meet Member States’ specific land needs. The review of the land sector includes mainstreaming gender in the development and implementation of national land policies that promote economic growth and preserve the livelihoods of African communities, as this is considered key to land policy growth for nation-states and the continent.

Between 2016 and 2018, Malawi was part of a six-country project examining opportunities to mainstream land governance issues in the agricultural National Agriculture Investment Plan (NAIP). One key recommendation of the study was to Empower Women and Vulnerable Groups in Agriculture to promote equitable agricultural investments including through programmes to allocate land and secure rights to land for women. Since then, Malawi has made great progress in enacting laws to support land governance including women’s rights to land. To show its continuous political will, Malawi made a request for technical assistance to ECA in 2019 through the Ministry of Lands, Urban Housing and Development. ECA responded by supporting Malawi in a project on Strengthening Women’s Land Tenure Security and Entrepreneurship, with training of gender and land stakeholders conducted in December 2020.

With the outbreak of the COVID-19, Malawi -like many other countries - faces challenges of ensuring food security, particularly the availability of agricultural inputs to meet its demand in view of supply chain disruptions that emanated from COVID-19 related restrictions. Because of pre-existing gender inequalities, deep-rooted discrimination and feminized poverty, the multifaceted consequences of the COVID crisis impacted women more than men, while at the same time placing increased responsibilities on women’s shoulders. In such an unprecedented and difficult context, ECA secured funding to continue supporting Malawi under the project Gender-responsive Land Governance in Africa as a Pathway for Enhancing Women’s Resilience in the Context of COVID-19. Under this project, the assessment study and policy dialogue are being undertaken.

The workshop has assembled a diverse group of stakeholders from the Ministries of Lands, Justice and Constitutional Affairs, Agriculture, Gender, Local Government, Parliamentarians; Representatives of parliamentary committees on agriculture; and legal practitioners. Others include representatives of farmer organisations, UN agencies such as FAO, UN Women, UN-Habitat, UN resident coordinator, OXFAM, Landnet, National Land Coalition, Centre for Environmental Policy and Advocacy (CEPA) and NGOs working on land and women. Gender advisory committee representatives, gender and human rights technical working groups and Representative of the women’s caucus committee and the Land Justice Consortium will also be present, as well as representatives from academia (LUANAR, University of Malawi) and research institutes (such as Mwapata).