Introduction
The Resilience of Organisations for Transformative Smallholder Agriculture Project (ROOTS) project was engaged as a co-financing mechanism as per the Gambia National Agricultural Investment Plan – Food and Nutrition Security (GNAIP-FNS II, 2017-2026) – to address the government’s priority concerns including account deficits, public services, population growth, outmigration of youth, agricultural productivity, climate change and environmental degradation, with the support of the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD). The principle goal of the project is to improve food security, nutrition and smallholder farmers’ resilience to climate change in The Gambia, which it targets through three main components:
1. Agricultural productivity and adaptation to climate change
2. Access to markets
3. Project management, institutional development, and citizen engagement The project supports targeted investments in infrastructure and farmers’ organizations, particularly youth and women and other stakeholders along the rice and horticulture value chains.
The project targets smallholders, micro-entrepreneurs, and poor rural youth and women, benefitting 40,000 households or 320,000 people. Women are the core producers in the rice and vegetable value chains in this context and so the project targets 80% women, 25% youth, and 10% people with disabilities (reflecting the national average). The project has a Gender and Youth Strategy which employs the Gender Action Learning Systems (GALS) methodology to promote intra-household participatory decision making and future planning. The GALS was piloted in three communities under the ROOTS project: Kanuma, Marakissa and Toniataba.
The project approaches social inclusion through concerted efforts to ensure that women and youth can participate actively and profitably in rice and vegetable production and post-harvest operations by addressing constraints faced by women and youth: leadership and participation in decisionmaking; access to finance and agricultural services/technologies; access to markets; and access to land and water. Land tenure is a major issue for women in The Gambia where traditional systems prevail to women’s disadvantage.
The two main types of land tenure systems in The Gambia are customary (whereby laws state that where a piece of land is cleared by a Kabiloo [a collection of families] the land belongs to the Kabiloo) and formal, consisting of leaseholds and freehold tenures (where ownership rights are granted by the State, generally for a term of 99 years when legally registered by the Attorney General’s Chambers). Generally, and especially in rural areas, the perception is that obtaining permission from the Kabiloo head (Alkalou) to develop a plot of land is sufficient for demonstrating ownership over it, however, issues like population growth and interest from developers are making available land more scarce.
Moreover, women are traditionally allocated parcels of their family plots for production, but these are often on poor quality land and they only have access but not control over it. The project supports land access rights for youth and women by pursuing formal tenure for the rice and horticultural plots which are targeted for use by women’s groups. Community gardens form the basis for women’s collectives responsible for their governance, and which are a continuation of the Nema project: the predecessor of the ROOTS project under IFAD.
This study presents community-level data in Part 1, on experiences and perceptions of land tenure security and its implications in four communities under the ROOTS project to inform gender transformative approaches (GTA) to increasing women’s land rights in The Gambia as part of the Women’s Land Rights (WLR) initiative from IFAD. The GTAs will be piloted under the project and lessons learned shared under a co-learning process with other WLR country projects. Preceding the data collection and analysis, a socio legal review was conducted in The Gambia by the Alliance of Bioversity International and the International Centre for Tropical Agriculture – the organisation leading the work in The Gambia. The gender data analysis was also followed up with a scoping and validation trip to meet with key stakeholders working on women’s land rights in The Gambia. The results of this trip form Part 2 of this report.
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