Slowly, Women Gain Ground Through Land Ownership

“I told my husband if he ever hits me (again), I’ll pack up and go to my parents who live just round the corner, and he will lose the land I got,” says Jannat Gul of Tando Bagho village here in this southern Pakistani district.

Her husband has not hit her for the past six months – since Gul became the owner of some 1.6 hectares of land.

She is one of the beneficiaries of a project of Pakistan’s Sindh province, initiated in 2008, to distribute 91,000 hectares of cultivable state land to 80,000 poor and landless peasants, many of them women.

While  land ownership in Pakistan certainly has great potential to empower women, there are still so many issues that remain unaddressed. This means women will continue to get the short end of the stick until barriers to empowerment, especially cultural ones, are addressed. B.M.

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