Bridging the Gender Gap in Land Rights: The Story of Peasant Women and the Indigenous Batwa Community in Kisoro District.

The question of Land ownership and control in Uganda remains indistinct especially for peasant women.  Generally, women in Uganda with specific interest on Kisoro District, farm the land and feed families, yet legally hold only a fraction of it. With national averages showing under 20–30% ownership in women's names, the tension between law and practice remains stark.

With Agriculture as the major source of livelihood and land as the key factor of production, peasant women face significant challenges in asserting and enjoying their land rights which requires more intentional and concerted efforts to redeem the current situation that may pose a threat to the region’s food security. With Kisoro featuring a mix of customary, leasehold, and freehold land tenure systems coupled with Land scarcity and high population density (small fragmented landholdings and intense competition for arable land) which complicates long-term land use planning and intensifies land conflicts. A larger portion of the landholders in Kisoro lack land titles and legal awareness about the land registration process increasing vulnerabilities to land grabbing, eviction, and inheritance disputes. Land inheritance customs tend to exclude daughters and widows from ownership, relegating them to users or caretakers.

Women, especially the peasant women, often lack ownership rights despite being key agricultural producers. “For me as long as I see the agreement in the house, I don’t care whose names are on. Despite me making the biggest contribution to the land purchase, I have always known it’s the man to own the land and as a woman I shouldn’t be bothered by those things,” Nyiramugisha Allen noted

Worse still, the Batwa, Kisoro’s indigenous forest people, who were evicted from Bwindi and Mgahinga Forests in the early 1990s when these were gazetted as national parks to date remain landless with inadequate resettlement schemes and often without secure tenure. A constitutional petition filed in 2013 remains unresolved, leaving the Batwa in legal limbo.

“We were just told to settle here by well-wishers, we have no documentation to this land and so we can’t tell what the future holds. As Batwa people we even lost our belonging you find most of us settling in peoples’ gardens, once one garden is harvested, we move to another like that like that.” – Bekunda Kate

Amidst such situations, ESAFF Uganda recently engaged with the peasant women and members of the Batwa Community to offer a transformative approach that fully equips women to visualize, negotiate and collectively act toward concrete land goals using innovative approaches such as the Gender Action Learning System (GALS) methodology, a community-led empowerment methodology designed to challenge gender inequalities and foster inclusive decision-making and serving as a powerful tool to empower peasant women to claim land rights and improve livelihoods. The Gender Action Learning System offers a culturally sensitive, visual, and participatory method to address deep-rooted inequalities in land access.

Through this engagement, peasant women appreciated the GALS training and methodology especially the Vision Road Journey and the Gender Balance tree which enabled them to reflect upon their personal and collective life goals, assess the various gender-based constraints, advocate for joint land titling and develop equitable, sustainable and inclusive solutions and plans for resource access including land, household and community development.

The shifting power dynamics at household and community levels, particularly for Batwa and other peasant women groups would not only enable peasant women and other marginalized members of the community to fully enjoy their land rights but would also empower them to speak confidently about land needs and engage men as allies in household and community decision-making.

"I really appreciate this training; I had no idea that a woman might have a long-term plan. I will use the Vision Road Journey to acquire a larger plot of land for my kids. I will now make better plans.”- Byekusungu Marion

Recommendations

1. There is need for purposive Collaboration between Ministry of Gender Labor and Economic Development and Ministry of Lands Housing and Urban Development (MoLHUD) to support women-friendly land documentation processes especially at local levels.

2. The Government through Ministry of Lands Housing and Urban Development should work with partners like ESAFF Uganda to in cooperate the GALS methodology to land dispute resolution platforms (e.g., Area Land Committees)

3. MoLHUD should intensify sensitization and awareness raising on land rights especially at community level to bridge the knowledge gap that is currently limiting peasant women from fully enjoying their Land Rights.

When combined with legal assistance, community advocacy, and policy reforms, the GALS methodology has the potential to turn statistical inequities into tangible land rights gains, thus reduction in house-holds conflicts, improve household income from secure land use, bridge the gap between marginalization and meaningful empowerment. It transforms gender dynamics, fosters accountability, and enables women not just to dream but rather actualize their plans.