KENYA

Population

people

Country size

hectares

Forest cover

hectares

overview

While favourable laws have been passed in recent years to protect women’s rights to own, use and manage land in Kenya, deeply ingrained patriarchal norms and a lack of awareness of those rights mean that women are often still evicted from their land if their husbands die or leave.

The support on land tenure security that local communities receive from state actors does not benefit men and women equally. Women also face difficulties related to claiming inherited land, unlawful omission from property titles, denial of widows' tenure rights and encroachment on women´s land. For these reasons, implementation of Kenya’s progressive land laws remains woefully behind.

Women suffer disproportionately from a broader trend of land grabbing in Kenya, often related to government evictions for development or fortress conservation.

Our Impacts

Haki Ardhi, a digital land rights abuse reporting tool, developed in partnership with TMG Research and the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) is successfully deployed in Taita Taveta and Kakamega counties. Cases are frequently reported through the system, including issues of forced eviction and interference in land management processes.
Haki Ardhi was developed based on the success of ForestLink. Users can report on illegalities by SMS and a smartphone app. This increases usage to include rural women without access to a smartphone.
A successful example is of a report received through Haki Ardhi where a woman was forcibly evicted from her land after her husband had passed away. She used Haki Ardhi to document the case and thanks to community mediation, the case was resolved. This shows Haki Ardhi's potential for documenting land rights issues and the pathways and blockages for justice for survivors.

Projects & Campaigns

ForestLink

Real-time community-based monitoring is a tool that connects local people with national law enforcement in an effort to stop illegal logging and deforestation.

Conservation & Human Rights

The traditional ‘fortress conservation’ approach of the west is premised on the dangerous yet persistent idea that local people need to be separated from nature to keep it “pristine” (sometimes for the benefit of foreign tourists). This does not only drive human rights violations but is also ineffective as it ignores and alienates the very people who have shaped and stewarded those landscapes for millennia.

Mapping for Rights

Mapping For Rights is an award-winning, interactive community map project for the Congo Basin, which started in November 2011 and is ongoing.

Agribusiness

Commercial agriculture projects have been associated with forceful displacement from their ancestral lands, protracted land conflicts, loss of livelihoods with little or no compensation, disregard for their free, prior and informed consent (FPIC), as well as water and soil pollution.