Kenya: Women Project to Fight land Grab

By Henry Neondo

KIAMBU--A seven-month project involving a grassroots women’s group and the provincial administration and with the support from the SIDA through the Embassy of Sweden in Kenya could end the seemingly unquenchable quest by land grabbers in rural urban centres.

To help achieve this, the project aims to empower grassroots women to take the lead to map out public land within their localities.

“People in authority have in the past grabbed land under their care leaving women without places they could earmark for markets, schools and Jua Kali sheds for their sons,” said John Kinyua, District Commissioner, Lari, Kiambu County.

Affirming what the DC said, Mrs Teresia Kimani, a women leader in Lari said women form the larger proportion of traders at any given market, but they also suffer the most as they had previously left the management of public land resources to the men-folk.

Speaking in Nairobi recently at the launch of a survey on public land in Lari Constituency, Kinyua said while all that people do before was to make noise when public land got grabbed, the new constitution however has empowered people, especially women and the youth to begin having a say on how public land is to be managed.

According to Kinyua, nothing testifies of the extent of land grabbing in the country than the Constituency Development Fund across many constituencies are spending money to purchase land for public projects. “This is a clear testimony that public lands have been grabbed and in private hands,” he said.

What this has boiled down to, he adds, “is that public offices are being bedevilled with encroaching on private property cases in courts of law. We thought that land belonged to the public but only came to realize later that grabbers had already personalized the lands in question,” said Kinyua.

According to Esther Mwaura, the National Coordinator of the GROOTS Kenya, a national , non-profit women organization that works to strengthen community participation,  inventory of lands has to be done to know what belongs to the public and what is not, “if the country has to move forward.

She said time was up when only the administrators need to know what belongs to the public when the members of the public themselves are not aware of what it is that they own and entrust on leaders.

The SIDA-supported project in Lari aimed at raising community awareness on their role in public land administration and management, profile women capacity to engage with land actors in the management of the land resources and harness women’s influence in the implementation of land policies.

According to Joseph Gatugu, chief , Kijabe location, Lari district said the project trained community members on the use of Global Information System for mapping all the four locations in Lari namely Kinale, Kambaa, Magina and Kijabe.