Lobby warns of women’s rights violations in community land registration
Elijah Ruso, a grazing manager, tends his camels on Musul community land in Laikipia County. He says land zoning has helped curb constant conflicts due to competition for pasture.
What you need to know:
- Women in the Ilpolei community of Laikipia are being excluded from community land registers and denied participation in key decision-making processes.
- An audit by the Kenya Land Alliance shows that none of the community land inventories submitted by counties contain gender-disaggregated data.
- The omission makes it impossible to track women’s involvement or ensure their rights are protected, raising concerns about systemic exclusion.
Florence Siamanta is a desperate woman. She and many other women in the Ilipolei community land in Laikipia County have been excluded from the community land register.
“The men won’t even allow you to attend the meetings where they discuss and make decisions on the management of the community. If you attempt to go, they chase you away like chickens. What are we going to do?” she asked, her voice full of hopelessness.
The dangerous hopelessness of exclusion persists even though the Constitution guarantees equality in access to and control of land. Exclusion exposes women to the long-term risk of landlessness unless they are economically empowered to acquire their own land, pushing them towards the brink of extreme poverty.
This gender blindness persists nearly a decade after the enactment of the Community Land Act, which paved the way for the registration of such land. A new audit on the land inventories submitted for unregistered community land by Kenya Land Alliance exposes worrying inequalities, undermining the principles of land policy provided for in Article 60 of the Constitution.
It demands not just the elimination of gender discrimination in law, customs, and practices related to land and property in land, but also the transparent administration of land and its equitable access.
The audit revealed that none of the inventories submitted by counties include gender-disaggregated data. In 2019, the Ministry of Lands identified 23 counties with unregistered community land targeted for registration. They include Mandera, Wajir, Garissa, Tana River, Kilifi, Kwale, Taita Taveta, Marsabit, Isiolo, and Meru.
Others are Tharaka Nithi, Kitui, Turkana, West Pokot, Elgeyo Marakwet, Baringo, Samburu, Laikipia, Narok, Kajiado, Siaya, Homa Bay, and Lamu. Counties were required to submit inventories listing all community land under their trusteeship, a prerequisite for registration and titling.
Only 13 counties have submitted inventories to date. The 159 unregistered community land captured so far include 63 parcels in Turkana, 21 in Kilifi, 18 in Samburu, and 14 in West Pokot, making them the largest contributors.
Mandera has submitted seven community parcels, while Wajir, Garissa and Isiolo have each submitted six. Baringo has submitted five. Lamu (two), Tana River (four), Taita Taveta (three) and Marsabit (four) have submitted the fewest.
But while these inventories meet the administrative requirement for listing land parcels, they lack one crucial element: information on the participation of women. Kenya Land Alliance Chief Executive Officer Faith Alubbe says lack of gender-related data is troubling.
“With the inventories, we could not really figure out how many women were included, how many women participated, if claims included women,” she says. “And of the women that participated, what was their demography? Is it older women, Gen Zs, single women, unmarried women, divorced women? We could not get that data. And this is data from the ministry.”
She believes the human resource in the Ministry of Lands and counties requires deeper sensitisation to make the collection of gender-disaggregated information a priority. She observes that deeper structural and political influences are slowing down inventory submissions.
The exercise is resource-intensive, leaving counties to move at uneven speed, she noted. Beyond that, political interference is shaping who participates in inventory processes and, in some cases, influencing how land use planning will unfold, she says.
Some leaders, she adds, are steering the process to align with ongoing spatial planning exercises, which expand municipalities and increase county revenues. This move may push ancestral land into taxable municipal zones, sparking public fears over losing freehold titles.
Such manoeuvres, the Kenya Land Alliance chief argued, violate Article 60 of the Constitution, which demands the security of land rights, sustainability, conservation of sensitive ecosystems, and use of community mechanisms to resolve disputes. “Any land registration exercise that fails to meet these standards risks re-abusing the communities,” she asserts.
