At COLANDEF, securing women’s land, property, and natural resource rights remains a key pillar of our work under our Women’s Land Rights portfolio. We recognize that every customary land area has its own dynamics and unique challenges. Therefore, even though we have designed models suited for documenting customary land rights across Ghana, we also situate our implementation approach in the context of each area to enable us to address the specific land rights issues women in each customary land area face and how the model could be adapted to benefit them. Our focus is to build the institutional capacity of customary land institutions, provide them with templates and tools for documenting customary lands, work with them to pilot the tools and templates and provide continuous backstopping as they progress from pilot to scaling up. Protection of women, youth and other vulnerable categories of farmers remain a key focus as we work in each customary land area.

One of our project areas is in the Ashanti Region of Ghana where we have partnered with Oxfam in Ghana and Customary Land Authorities, to institute mechanisms for customary land rights documentation and customary arbitration for resolving land disputes. More than 35% of the total beneficiary are women who are captured as joint owners or individual owners of the farm parcels. A total of 150 households have been captured so far, with over 1,000 indirect beneficiaries. The systems and structures for continuous documentation of land rights have been set up. Farmers have been educated on the benefits of patronizing the documentation services. 

At COLANDEF, we believe that through sustained partnerships and institutional capacity building of customary land institutions, securing customary land rights for women and all agricultural land users through documentation will become an integral part of customary land administration.