A training on land rights conducted by Ungweru Organization and facilitated by Ministry of Land officials on the 23rd of November had brought about success as Community and Spiritual Leaders had acknowledged that women must have access to land and must be included in Land allocation decision making processes.
In this training, the Ungweru team and Ministry of Land officials had engaged chiefs and spiritual leaders in Mpherembe in an effort to advocate for women inclusion in land allocation decision making processes and equal access to land. The training was in three facets, the first was to get the perspective of culture from the chiefs on the nexus of women, culture and customary land. The second facet involved government officials unbundling the revised national land laws to the leaders present and the organization’s perspective which advocated for women empowerment through access to land. The third facet was to garner the leaders’ point of view on the organization’s perspective.
The third facet of training sufficed to call the training a success. Final presentation from the chiefs in the third facet had displayed the leaders’ initial perspective to have changed. Both community and spiritual leaders had agreed to include women in land allocation decision making processes and allocating land to the female child as they do with the male child. “We are okay with with registering land in the name of a girl child. This will indeed protect women whereby if she loses her husband or her marriage and she is no longer wanted at the husband’s village, she will be be able to sustain her livelihood as she will have land to farm back at her home village”, said one the spiritual leaders present.
