Gender Mainstreaming in Land Access & Resettlement Compendium EN

This compendium draws together the Insight Series developed by Steyn Reddy Associates (SRA) on Gender Mainstreaming in Land Access & Resettlement. It helps projects take practical steps to ensure that vulnerabilities related to women and sexual and gender minorities are appropriately addressed throughout the land access and resettlement process, including the engagement, assessment, planning, implementation, and monitoring & evaluation stages.

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Overview

Gender mainstreaming is critical to a successful land access and resettlement process, and is becoming an increasingly significant issue for financial institutions and other industry stakeholders. However, much remains to be done to ensure a comprehensive gender-informed approach to managing physical and economic displacement, beyond mere tokenism.

Gender needs to be considered as an issue that permeates all land access and resettlement activities. Projects should not assume that women and men are homogeneous groups, or that women are all the same. Gender is one of the many facets of an individual’s identity, and projects should strive to identify intersecting vulnerabilities in other areas (e.g., disability, education, ethnicity). Women in vulnerable positions (e.g., migrants or domestic workers) may be doubly exposed to certain risks, including violence, landlessness, joblessness, increased morbidity and mortality, or food insecurity.

A comprehensive approach is needed to address women’s and sexual and gender minorities’ particular vulnerabilities. Gender mainstreaming refers to any cross-cutting strategy aiming to achieve gender equality in all areas.

This involves integrating a gender approach into all aspects of a particular land access and resettlement process, including the engagement, assessment, planning, implementation, and monitoring & evaluation stages.

Land access and resettlement projects need to embrace and adopt this strategy into their core planning to better understand, assess and address vulnerable groups’ needs and project impacts on them. Particular focus should be placed on women and girls, as studies show that these groups face multiple vulnerabilities that are often overlooked or not adequately addressed.

This Compendium offers practical guidance for mainstreaming gender considerations throughout the land access and resettlement process. It includes chapters on how best to incorporate gender considerations in project planning and preparation, stakeholder engagement, cultural heritage management, baseline data collection and analysis, impact assessment and mitigation planning, compensation planning, physical resettlement, livelihood restoration, and monitoring & evaluation.