Opportunities

Food Security

The severity of food shortages and continuing deterioration of food production and consumption provides CLEAR with an opportunity to develop and initiate pilot interventions, which could alleviate food insecurity at household levels, e.g. supporting poor landless women to access common land for farming activities and providing them with relevant inputs. Additional efforts will be put into co-operating with agricultural scientific centres of excellence and experts to strengthen interaction and information/technological flow to the communities and documenting best practices.

Urban Settlement, Housing and Shelter

It will be crucial to take cognizance of the rural and urban poor particularly those living in slums and informal settlements given the rapid urbanization in the region. The proliferation of slums and informal settlements in Africa is continuing to breed urban poverty. This offers CLEAR the opportunity to begin to address slum policies, incorporate security of tenure enhancing housing rights of the poor with specific provisions for poor women.  Specific opportunities exist for the following:

• Promotion of secure tenure, and the importance of recognizing the urban poor as partners in tenure and shelter improvements at the regional, national and local levels
• Advocacy for women’s participation in local governance and pro-poor gender-sensitive urban policies
• Strengthening of national capacities to review and amend legislation to provide for treatment of women on an equal footing with men.
• Promotion of efforts for improved access to basic services such as water, sanitation and waste management in both urban and rural settlements, and to improve urban transport
• Promotion of improved access to finance and credit, especially more appropriate forms of credit for the urban poor the majority of who are women.
• Maintenance of an up-to-date understanding of global shelter conditions and trends as well as of progress made in implementing the shelter dimension of the Habitat Agenda within an African Context
• Contribution to UN-Habitat’s consistency and continuity on crosscutting policy issues including gender and capacity building, norms, tools and information strategy.
• Support to the development of people-centred slum-upgrading policies at the national and city levels through scaling-up of locally gained experiences.
• Documentation of migration patterns of pastoralists to urban areas with specific reference to coping mechanisms and their implications for the livelihoods of women as opposed to men.

Climate Change & Environmental Issues

CC clearly offers an opportunity to rethink gender inequities and to involve both women and men in finding ‘new’ avenues and solutions that can respond to today’s profound environmental challenges.  CLEAR has some entry –points for integrating gender concerns into an adaptation policies and practice (Climate Change to Africa: A Call for Action. 10th Meeting of the Africa Partnership Forum APF/TOKYO-2008/04):

• Link up with institutions promoting gender-focused climate-change research, and gender-disaggregated indicators for national reporting.
• Advocate in the National Adaptation Program of Strategies/Actions to be designed to take into account the different impacts of climate change, and climate policies on women and men.
• Advocate for Adaptation Fund to be directed to the most vulnerable communities, promoting poverty reducing, gender sensitive programs.
• Advocate to ensure that any plans for adaptation to climate change involve women in the heart of adaptation consultations, planning and implementation

At community level, women and men must be equally involved in building adaptive capacity, to ensure that both women’s and men’s interests – their differing roles and resources- are taken into account. In this way, adapting to climate change can help reduce gender inequalities and so promote long-term development too.

Conflict over Land and Natural Resources

Conflict over natural resources is growing in different regions and people are threatened by deprivation of property, goods and services and the right to return to their homes of origin, as well as by violence and insecurity. CLEAR shall intervene by doing research on the patterns and magnitude of the problem and identifying intervention strategies targeting refugees, returnees and internally displaced persons in countries such as Somalia, Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Zimbabwe and Burundi. It can mileage in this regard by linking up with peace and dispute resolution organisations such as RECONCILE, African Peace Forum, Peacenet AFRICA and Somali Women’s Agenda (SWA)  which already have a presence on the ground. The UNHCR and instruments such as the Arusha Peace Accord and the Protocol on Repatriation of Refugees, and Reinstallation of Displaced People (Article 4) would be handy. First hand, information could also be sourced from migrants through the IOM.
CLEAR could also provide legal support to women threatened with dispossession of their land and natural resources. The availability of peace negotiations offers CLEAR a great opportunity to network and contribute towards mainstreaming women’s issues. Specific opportunities also exist in working with Resolution 1325.

 HIV & AIDS

The question of land ownership is aggravated by the prevalence of HIV/AIDS pandemic, which affects and affects women and men disproportionately. In defining CLEAR’s role on HIV/AIDS there’s a logical choice as an entry point for CLEAR to mainstream HIV/AIDS in all its programs and partner with other initiatives/bodies in order to understand and address the powerful linkages between the pandemic and the land issue in the following areas:

• Effect of HIV/AIDS pandemic on women’s land rights, access to and control of land for food production food production at the household level and women’s labour and time with regard to subsistence food production
• Coping strategies, which rural women have developed to ensure the continued survival of their families and drastically reduce vulnerability to dispossession by patrilineal kin on the death of male household heads.
• Sub-regional initiatives to research on the impact of HIV/AIDS on tenure systems in the sub region
• Linkages with on-going partnerships in the sub region e.g. the UN-HABITAT’s Partnership for Managing HIV/AIDS at the local level and the Alliance of Mayors Initiatives for Community Action on Aids at the Local Level (UN-AMICAALL); the sub regional country HIV/AIDS programs and focal points within the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and its sub regional programs in Africa; and the UN-system wide agencies including UNAIDS, UNDP, UNIFEM, UNICEF etc.
• Advocate for land policies and laws to protecting the rights of HIV/AIDS widows and orphans.

Partnership with Organisation Agencies & Working on Land

CLEAR will establish partnership with existing intergovernmental organisations, agencies and organisations working on land such as: the AU- NEPAD; the RECs (EAC, SADC, ICGLR, IGAD, COMESA), UN agencies (UNIFEM, HABITAT, UNEP, UNAIDS, UNEECA, UNDP) , International, Regional and National NGOs ( National Land Alliances (KLA, ULA, Land Network , Rwanda), EASSI, Institute of Agrarian Studies, ACTS, African Centre for Gender and Development, African Gender and Trade Network Pan African Land Reform, Action Aid, Southern African Regional Poverty Network, Human Rights Watch, Oxfam, CARE, Southern African Research and Documentation Centre, Women in Development in Southern African Awareness, MS- Danish, SNV), bilateral agencies and gender specific organisations.

 International Instruments & Commitments

A whole array of international covenants, treaties and frameworks exist providing anchorage of initiatives on livelihoods. Such include the Millennium Development Goals, World Summit on Sustainable Development, World Conference on Population and Development, Conference on Human Settlement, Human Rights treaties such as CEDAW Article 5 (d) and (e), and International Committee on Social, Economic and Cultural Rights, International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (Article 14 (1).

International & regional forums 

Offer opportunities for CLEAR to dialogue and share as well as receive information. CLEAR could apply for observer status in the various international and regional bodies in order to be strategically placed to influence trends.