Millions of women across the globe farm and look after land – yet are excluded from owning it, hurting their incomes, depriving them of wealth and undermining their other basic rights. Anandita Ghosh and Shivani Satija on a wide-ranging issue of the Oxfam-edited Gender and Development journal that not only examines structural obstacles to women owning land but also looks at broader themes, including the way deprivation of land rights adds to women’s care workload – and, crucially, how securing women’s land and water rights will be essential for global food security and climate resilience.

This guest post is from Dennis Avilés (right), Oxfam’s Sustainable Agriculture and Gender Advisor Trying to explain why half of the world’s farmers are systematically underperforming can be elusive. However, the recently published “Gender in Agriculture. Closing the knowledge gap” by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation has just done that. The book is a series of background studies commissioned