A new report by the NGO Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) reviewed national laws and regulations across 35 countries in Latin America, Asia and Africa. It found that since RRI’s 2017 assessment, there’s been little progress in securing women’s rights to forests in Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities.
“We’re looking at a community’s rights of access to use resources from the forest, to exclude third parties from their community forest areas, their right to due process and compensation and their rights of management,” Chloe Ginsberg, the associate director of the tenure-track program at RRI, told Mongabay in a phone call.
The researchers also looked at the rights of women for voting in their communities, their rights to dispute resolution and rights to community-level inheritance.
The report builds on a study that was conducted by RRI in 2017 that looked at the rights of women in 30 countries across the Global South. To update the findings, RRI collaborated with consultants to review 800 different laws, more than a quarter of which were either enacted or reformed since the original study.
Despite new laws, Ginsberg said her group found that most laws follow a “gender-blind” approach that fails to explicitly protect women. They also observed backsliding, where newer laws provide fewer protections for women than previous ones.
Of the 35 countries analyzed in the new report, 34 constitutionally recognize women’s equality and property rights. However, only 11 countries guarantee women the right to inherit property when someone dies without a will.
The report found that just 2% of legal frameworks they analyzed provide adequate protection for voting rights, 5% for community leadership structures and 13% for the right to inheritance, figures that have remained virtually unchanged between 2016 and 2024.
There are just five years left before the 2030 target date for the United Nations sustainable development goals. Yet the report found that not a single goal around gender equality is on track to be met, including the goal to ensure equal rights for land ownership.
Ginsberg said codifying the rights of women does far more than help any individual woman — it strengthens food security and improves livelihoods for entire families and communities.
“Oftentimes, Indigenous, Afro-descendant and local community women are the holders of intergenerational knowledge and transmit this intergenerational knowledge within their communities. And as such, they’re really vital stewards of their community resources,” Ginsberg said. “So, when community women have secure rights to their lands and resources, they’re much better positioned to advance the sustainability and conservation objectives of their communities.”
Banner image: Members of the Talang Mamak community collect forest products in Indonesia. Photo courtesy of Jacob Maentz/Rights and Resources Initiative.
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