A Fair Share for Women: Toward More Equitable Land Compensation and Resettlement in Tanzania and Mozambique

The paper argues that women in Tanzania and Mozambique are disproportionately harmed by large-scale land investments in agribusiness, extractives, and logging due to a lack of formal land rights and their subordinate roles in society. It finds that current legal frameworks fail to protect women, who are often bypassed in compensation payments and excluded from decision-making processes. The authors recommend mandating compensation for all household members, ensuring replacement land is held jointly, and implementing gender quotas in governance bodies to ensure women's meaningful participation.

• Women in the global South, specifically in Tanzania and Mozambique, disproportionately suffer the negative effects of large-scale land investments in sectors such as agribusiness, extractives, and logging. These investments lead to the loss of land, displacement, and loss of livelihoods, with impacts being more severe for women than men.
• Legal frameworks in Tanzania and Mozambique fail to adequately protect rural women from harmful commercial land deals. While laws require community consultations and compensation, they often ignore women's specific land interests, their farming activities, and their reliance on common property resources like water, firewood, and wild plants.
• Women are frequently excluded from receiving compensation payments because payments are typically made at the household level to the husband as the head of household. Additionally, women often receive lower payments because they tend to grow subsistence crops, which are frequently not compensated, unlike the cash crops grown primarily by men.
• Women are underrepresented in the decision-making bodies that oversee land acquisition and resettlement. In Mozambique, the technical committee responsible for resettlement oversight does not mandate women's representation, and the gender ministry is not required to provide input on resettlement plans.
• The loss of communal lands and forests disproportionately affects women, as it removes their access to essential resources for household consumption and supplemental livelihoods. This loss, combined with a lack of replaced social infrastructure (such as health posts) at resettlement sites, severely undermines women's resilience.
• To achieve gender equity, the authors recommend that compensation be mandated for all household members with land interests, that replacement land be registered in the names of both spouses, and that gender quotas be implemented in community governance bodies like Tanzania's village councils and Mozambique's Technical Resettlement Monitoring and Supervision Committee.

APA

World Resources Institute (n.d.). A Fair Share for Women: Toward More Equitable Land Compensation and Resettlement in Tanzania and Mozambique. https://www.wri.org/research/fair-share-women-toward-more-equitable-land-compensation-and-resettlement-tanzania-and

Chicago

World Resources Institute. A Fair Share for Women: Toward More Equitable Land Compensation and Resettlement in Tanzania and Mozambique. n.d. https://www.wri.org/research/fair-share-women-toward-more-equitable-land-compensation-and-resettlement-tanzania-and.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Resources Institute |title=A Fair Share for Women: Toward More Equitable Land Compensation and Resettlement in Tanzania and Mozambique |url=https://www.wri.org/research/fair-share-women-toward-more-equitable-land-compensation-and-resettlement-tanzania-and |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldresourcesinstitutendfair, author = {{World Resources Institute}}, title = {{A Fair Share for Women: Toward More Equitable Land Compensation and Resettlement in Tanzania and Mozambique}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, url = {https://www.wri.org/research/fair-share-women-toward-more-equitable-land-compensation-and-resettlement-tanzania-and}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }