Source: Daily Maverick
"A few days ago, I was at a community meeting... We were under a tree."

Vivek Maru, CEO of human rights law NGO Namati, has a soft manner of speaking that underscores the weight of his words. At the mention of the tree setting, his unseen Johannesburg audience strains a little closer to the screen, on which the conference is being streamed. Maru may be addressing a London congregation, but the story he is relaying belongs to another continent; indeed, just a few kilometers from where we sit, our Constitutional Court is built around the concept of 'justice under a tree'.

"In Yimbani province in Mozambique... We were under a tree, "Maru repeats. "The men were sitting along wooden benches, and the women were all – guess where? On the ground. They were sitting on the sand. And when the paralegal started to talk about the very clear, formal protections for women's land rights that are in Mozambican land law, passed in 1997, people laughed," he pauses a beat. "The men laughed. The women also laughed, sort of nervously."

It is day one of the Reuters 'Trust Women' conference on human trafficking and the economic empowerment of women, being streamed live from London: the current discussion, for which Maru is a panelist, is about land. Maru's company, Namati, helps communities to document their customary land claims by providing a frontline of grassroots legal advocates "who can bridge between the formal system and real life." Maru emphasises that in order for a community to finally get the land use certificate, the documented local land rules and claims need to be compliant with the national constitution.

"That process," Maru argues, "creates a lever to reform inequitable customary laws." (Presuming, of course, that the national constitution upholds equality.)

Addressing gender inequality is like trying to create a spider's web – an expanse of opportunity – where each thread is crucial to outcome, but where identifying which thread comes first, or which hold the majority of the weight, is often a matter of trial and error. As one member of the London audience cuttingly points out, we have been aware of land and other challenges that women face for many years (in Beijing 20 years ago, much the same discussion took place); yet, effective and far-reaching solutions still evade us. Our webs are still collapsing.

Land has long been identified as a crucial foundation thread to advance women's rights. According to Monique Villa, the fittingly female CEO of Reuters, globally, only 20% of owned land is in the hands of women. In sub-Saharan Africa, where men tend to travel to cities to find work, the majority of smallholder farmers are female; however, most do not own titles to their land. And this, argues David Norman, is directly detrimental not only to women's empowerment, but also to business interests.

"At the heart of this, there is a business case to be made," Norman says emphatically. (As CEO of SAB Miller, he's in a good position to make this argument).

A multinational brewery, SAB Miller relies on the crops produced by 'many tens of thousands' of small-scale farmers in sub-Saharan Africa. But, says Norman, without land rights, women have little incentive to plan beyond the long term and little means of attracting the investment of big corporations like SAB. What is more, because they do not technically own the land, they are unable use it as collateral to access credit.

"So, two fundamental constraints in terms of upgrading the quality and productivity of that land, vital for productivity eradication and quite frankly, vital for our business to be growing in sub-Saharan Africa, are rooted in land rights." Norman contends.

The micro- and macro- level spin-offs (from rights, to health, education, and economic growth) from the empowerment of women are far-reaching and well documented. However, an argument still primarily framed in terms of rights suddenly gains a lot more traction when a clear business case, involving quantifiable outputs, is made. The advancement of women's land rights could be sped up if this potential alignment with investor prospects is harnessed in the right way. The challenge is to ensure that the structures put in place to advance and protect women's rights, and to ensure that they benefit fairly in cases like this, actually do so.

As one member of the audience put it, "How can we make sure that agencies – whether government, or corporate, or NGOs – are made accountable to women?"

In a sense, it is a Catch 22. The best people to ensure women's land rights are advanced are women themselves; but they need to be economically empowered in to do this. And, in addition to land and credit, there is a third crucial thread in the spider-wed of equality: psychological empowerment.

In many developing countries and particularly in rural communities, boys and girls grow up believing that women are subordinate. This belief is confirmed by everything they see around them. Societal structures are built on centuries old, narrowly defined gender roles, reflected in music, dance, work and play. Girls are groomed for a life of servitude. When finances are tight, it is the girls who are often forced to drop out of school. Passed like property from fathers to husbands – many of whom regard their young wives merely as tools for procreation and pleasure – girls have little opportunity to break the cycle of dependence. Even if they were to leave, without money or education, where could they go? What could they do?

The psychological barriers to women's economic empowerment are well known to Muhammed Yunus, Nobel Peace Prize winner and founder of Grameen Bank in Bangladesh. In a country where less than 1% of borrowers lend to women, Grameen Bank is almost exclusively a women's bank. "It took us six years [to set up the bank]," Yaru tells the audience, "Because women themselves didn't believe they should take the money and do something."

He says that when his employees become frustrated trying to reach out to women, he reminds them, "When a women says "I don't know anything about money, I'm afraid of money... this is not her voice. It is the voice of the history that made her. She has been buried under layers and layers of fear generated by society. So you don't expect that all those fears suddenly disappear."

However, Yanus says that over time, this begins to change; the layers of fear and self-doubt begin to peel away. And when women see that other women have prospered with the help of micro-credit, they begin to believe that maybe they can, too.

To return to that first discussion on land: when the paralegal from Namati began speaking about women's property rights under a tree in Mozambique a few days before the conference, the community laughed: the men from their bench, the women from the ground.

"The reason they were laughing," Viveck Maru suggests, "is that those formal legal provisions are so far away from their lives that it's funny."

Or, the idea of women having the same rights as men may simply have been inconceivable – laughable, even. For women to become economically empowered, we need more than land and credit. We need, and our societies need, to believe that we deserve to sit on that bench.