International Women's Day: CEDAW and Women's Land Rights

The Stand for Her Land (S4HL) campaign is driven by a Coalition of national and local NGOs, CSOs and individuals in Bangladesh which envisions accelerating secure women’s land rights as a foundation for achieving gender equality, women’s economic empowerment, and sustainable development.

S4HL thinks that women’s land rights (WLR) are essential to gender equality and women’s economic empowerment, and to the realization of fundamental human rights. When women have equal and active decision-making authority over land and property, they become equal participants in social, political, and economic life within their households, communities, and countries. Recognizing this, S4HL campaign has been working in Bangladesh based on the priority issues of women land rights. One of the priority issues of policy advocacy is to advocate for the implementation of CEDAW along with withdrawal of reservations aiming to establish equal rights for women.

In this context, the S4HL campaign has brought the issue of CEDAW for policy discussion during celebration of International Women’s Day 2023. A national seminar was organized on March 18, at CIRDAP auditorium, Dhaka participated by NGOs, CSOs, women leaders, human rights activists, academics, lawyers, media etc. Around 120 men and women from grassroots and national level attended the meeting. The objective of the seminar was to initiate a brainstorming session about CEDAW and women land rights and taking strategy for advocacy with the relevant institutions.

Two keynote papers presented in the seminar focusing implementation status of the government’s commitment to the CEDAW committee’s observation particularly on women’s land and property rights issue and drew participants' recommendation for advocacy and communication activities on the issues of the seminar.