Uncovering the Barriers to Rural Women's Land Rights in Kyrgyzstan: A Conversation with Mirlan Aitkaziev

On a global level, rural women face disproportionately high barriers to secure land tenure. Lack of access to and control over land and the necessary resources to use it productively pose significant hurdles to rural women’s empowerment and livelihoods. Many factors limit women’s land rights, including discriminatory policies and socio-cultural norms that favour men as landholders and heirs.

To address these barriers, the Global Initiative ‘Securing Women’s Resource Rights through Gender Transformative Approaches’ has piloted approaches to tackle the root causes of gender inequality in land tenure in six countries: Bangladesh, Colombia, Ethiopia, The Gambia, Kyrgyzstan, and Uganda. In each country, the Global Initiative worked closely with a large IFAD-funded country project to integrate actions to strengthen women’s land rights through gender transformative approaches.

In Kyrgyzstan, the Global Initiative collaborated with the Access to Markets Project (ATMP), which aims to raise incomes and enhance economic growth in Kyrgyzstan’s pastoralist communities. Mehrigiul Ablezova of PIL LLC spoke with ATMP coordinator Mirlan Aitkaziev about his experience incorporating a gender transformative perspective on women’s land rights into the project and participating in a global workshop where experiences from the six pilot countries were presented and discussed.