Where Women Take Root
How Landesa and Stand for Her Land are Growing Futures Through Women’s Land Rights
By Claire O’Donnell, Together Women Rise Transformation Partnerships Writer
Long before the concept of “conservation” existed, women were doing the work. Tending to fields and forests. Reading the soil and the seasons. Rural and Indigenous women have always been among the earth’s original caretakers. Today, they remain on the frontlines, restoring degraded land, protecting biodiversity, and growing more than half the world’s food.
And yet, the land they tend rarely belongs to them.
Only 23% of countries have laws granting women and men equal land rights, and even in those where laws exist on paper, centuries of discriminatory norms leave millions of women with rights they cannot access and land they cannot claim.
Together Women Rise is a charitable giving community dedicated to advancing global gender equality. Since 2022, we’ve invested $350,000 in Landesa through our Transformation Partnership Program — because land rights sit at the intersection of everything we care about: women’s economic equality, decision-making power, and climate resilience. Over the last four decades, Landesa has strengthened land rights for more than 700 million people, embedding protections not just in law but in the everyday life of communities, governments, and the systems that shape them.
Now, Landesa serves as the secretariat for Stand for Her Land, a global campaign built to close the gap between rights that exist on paper and the reality women actually live. The campaign works the way a forest does: as a living network rooted in land rights advocates, women’s groups, faith leaders, climate activists, and allies across the globe, all calling with one voice for gender-equal land rights to become reality. And each woman who gains knowledge, confidence, or power becomes shelter for the next to grow.
In Bangladesh, Sabina trained as a paralegal through Stand for Her Land, learning laws and procedures that Indigenous communities had long been shut out of. When the Bangladesh government fell in 2024 and others fled, her community stayed, protecting their land documents through the chaos because Sabina had taught them why those papers mattered. “This is our land,” she said. “Why should we go?”
In Ethiopia, Belaynesh sits on the traditional court of her kebele (a small administrative unit in Ethiopia) as “Haadha Siinqee,” a trusted elder who protects women’s rights and mediates local disputes using centuries-old traditions. Stand for Her Land’s legal literacy trainings gave her new tools to bring to that longstanding position. When a woman came to her with an inheritance dispute that had lingered 30 years — her siblings having seized her parents’ home, leaving her silenced and shut out — Belaynesh encouraged her to try again. This time, she won.
“Land is power,” says Tumu in Liberia, who faced years of instability after her divorce. Today, she owns her own home and, after gaining knowledge about women’s land rights from Landesa, co-founded Each One Teach One, a women’s group that meets regularly to exchange information on women’s rights and educate others about land rights.
Each of these women found her footing through a coalition, a training, and a network of women. Landesa and Stand for Her Land gave them the tools, knowledge, and support to claim their rights, while connecting them to a broader movement working toward the same goal. And each woman, in turn, became a steward for the next, helping others navigate systems that had long excluded them.
This is the transformative power that Stand for Her Land is cultivating: turning land rights into local knowledge, growing grassroots movements, and helping communities challenge discriminatory norms while advancing women’s rights to the land they have always tended.
And this work is not happening under easy conditions. Rising nationalism has cut public funding and shrunk the space for civil society in some of the very countries where Stand for Her Land operates. The campaign is meeting that challenge by helping its coalitions build fundraising capacity, develop local leadership, and strengthen their ability to sustain the work long term. This approach ensures that progress does not depend on any single source of support. Instead, it helps local movements continue advancing women’s land rights with the resources, leadership, and community backing they need to endure.
A forest is stronger than a single tree. And Tumu, Sabina, and Belaynesh are proof that when women gain rights to their land, they don’t just change their own lives, they enrich the soil for the next generation. Because where women take root, futures grow.
to extend and strengthen land rights for women experiencing poverty. Stronger rights to land have the power to reduce poverty and conflict, increase economic activity, empower women, strengthen food security, and improve environmental stewardship.