Learning route on women’s access to land in East Africa

Kampala, Sunday 7th of March
ILC-Procasur-ULA Learning Route: “Action-oriented research and Policy Influence for Women’s Access to Land in Africa. The experience of Uganda and Kenya”

I arrived late last night at Entebbe airport and woke this morning to a sunny day – it has been raining buckets here in the past week, so this seems a good omen for our Learning Route!

The Route, organised jointly by International Land Coalition (ILC), Procasur, and ULA (Uganda Land Alliance), both of them members of the Coalition, starts tomorrow and continues until 17 March.

The Route includes case studies from the project “Securing Women’s Access to Land: Linking Research and Action” ILC has been carrying out in cooperation with the Makerere Institute for Social Research – MISR (Makerere University in Kampala) and the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies – PLAAS (University of the Western Cape in Cape Town) over the last two and a half years. The aim is to link research and action by bringing together different stakeholders in small, action-oriented, research projects, accompanied and supported by MISR and PLAAS on the research side and by ILC on the advocacy side. All projects (except Rwanda, unfortunately) are participating in the Route with two people each, with one person coming from the community where research was carried out.

Having been involved in the coordination of the project from Rome, I can't wait to see what has been happening at the community level!

The Route also includes two panels on the work of Uganda Land Alliance and Kenya Land Alliance on influencing national policy, to which different stakeholders including policy-makers, are invited. Originally, the Uganda panel was suppose to be tomorrow, but it turns out that 8 March is a public holiday in Uganda. Why? Because it is International Women’s Day, of course! What better day to start a Learning Route on women's land rights?

Over the next 9 days, we will travel across Uganda and Kenya with a group of 25 people (mainly women!) from 11 countries, including Uganda and Kenya, of course, but also Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe (other countries with small research projects under the above mentioned project) – as well as Bangladesh and Bolivia (the representatives from ILC members taking a lead role in coordinating work on women’s land rights in Asia and Latin America respectively).

Tomorrow we open the Route here in Kampala and after lunch we set off to our first destination in Uganda on the Learning Route Bus! We are heading to Kagadi to see the work of URDT (Uganda Rural Development Training) on “Voices of Women’s Aspirations over land and land matters: The case of Kibaale district” from up close. More to follow in the next few days!

Greetings from Kampala to Rome,
Sabine

P.S.: For more information on the Route, go to www.landcoalition.org and click the banner! For more on the IDRC- funded project “Securing Women’s Access to Land: Linking Research and Action”, go to: http://www.landcoalition.org/?p=2891