Women's Rights to Land and Assets

It is important to make a conceptual distinction between projects that seek to reduce poverty and enhance productivity and those that seek to empower women, as the strategies adopted in each case could be different. Effective poverty targeting can ensure that short-term material benefits reach the poorest without necessarily leading to enhanced voice and equality, as the review of some development projects in Bangladesh, India and Nepal reveals. This paper assesses progress towards gender equality and rural poverty reduction through women's control over land and identifies a few key policy options in mainstreaming gender in development programmes to achieve the millennium development goals.