New York (March 11, 2025)—As the global community convenes for the 69th session of the Commission on the Status of Women, the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) today released a new report uncovering alarmingly little—and in many cases stagnating—progress since 2016 on community women’s rights to forests across 35 countries spanning 80% of the forests in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. The report, Resilience and Resistance, warns that without urgent action from governments, policymakers, donors, and allies, this disparity not only threatens the livelihoods of women and their communities but undermines the broader fight to combat climate change, protect biodiversity, and drive sustainable development worldwide.
Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women play a key role in accelerating multiple global agendas, ensuring food security in their communities, and preventing deforestation in their territories, which make up more than one-third of the world’s remaining forests. Yet despite comprising half of the 2.5 billion Indigenous and rural peoples who depend on collectively held lands and forests, and nearly a decade of progress in international law and national legislative reform, the report reveals that as of 2024, a mere 5% of legal frameworks regulating community forest tenure adequately protect women’s community-level leadership rights.
Reflecting the latest data collected under RRI’s Gender Methodology, the findings also highlight that only 13% of legal frameworks recognize women’s community-level inheritance rights and 2% recognize women’s community-level voting rights—which are pivotal for Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women to secure and manage the forestlands they have relied on for generations.
While all examined countries have ratified the UN Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination against Women (CEDAW), no country is remotely close to meeting their legal obligations to protect women’s community-based rights to membership, governance, inheritance, and dispute resolution rights. With less than five years to achieve the UN’s 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the limited progress observed between 2016 and 2024 underscores that governments are unlikely to meet gender equality objectives by 2030 without swift, gender-transformative action to ensure compliance with international human rights standards.
“Global and regional progress toward achieving SDG Goal 5 on gender equality, state obligations under CEDAW, and the Beijing Declaration’s strategic objectives remain alarmingly insufficient,” said Dr. Solange Bandiaky-Badji, RRI Coordinator.
“With just five years remaining to achieve the objectives of the 2030 Agenda, our report builds upon existing data on land and gender, reinforcing that the world has significant work to do to meet these targets. If the SDGs on women’s rights are to be realized, the recognition of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s land and resource rights must be prioritized, funded, accelerated, and aligned with international human rights laws.”
“The lack of meaningful progress toward securing community women’s tenure rights constitutes a direct violation of their human rights, individual autonomy, personal liberty, security, privacy, and integrity,” said Dr. Omaira Bolaños, Gender Justice Director at RRI.
“The rights most pivotal for community women to shape their and their communities’ relationship with forest resources, voting and leadership, continue to receive the least amount of adequate protection under national law. This limits their ability to challenge gender-discriminatory norms and meaningfully participate in key decisions impacting them.”
Despite these setbacks, there are signs of progress due to the resilience and tireless advocacy of community women, who have for generations fought for a place at the table in their communities and political and policy arenas. Since RRI first published the landmark first edition of the report, Power and Potential, in 2017, the importance of gender-responsive land reform has garnered greater global acceptance, and there was a slight increase, to 20%, in the proportion of 104 legal frameworks recognizing community women’s dispute resolution rights and to 29% recognizing women’s community membership rights.
“We are learning how we can support women at the grassroots level so that they can make decisions when it comes to their governance and their own leadership, their laws and policies, at the local and regional level, to feed into global-level policies,” said Loretta Alethea Pope, Executive Director at the Foundation for Community Initiatives (FCI) in Liberia and member of the Women in Global South Alliance (WiGSA).
Regional findings
Countries in Africa have passed the most legal reforms since 2016, yet the 13 countries analyzed exhibit the lowest degree of progress for the forest tenure rights of Indigenous and local community women at the regional level. Africa is the only region where no legal framework provides adequate protections for community women’s rights to vote.
Three reforms made to legal frameworks in Mali, Republic of Congo, and Madagascar diminished previous protections for community women’s rights, while one additional gender-blind reform in Mali failed to specify women’s right to vote in community-level governance bodies. Only one reform in Kenya resulted in specific progress for women’s leadership rights.
In Asia, the 11 countries analyzed demonstrate the highest degree of proportional advancements for Indigenous and local community women’s legal rights to community forests. However, Asia is the only region where one country (Indonesia) still fails to provide equal constitutional protection for women, and although reforms containing some positive provisions were passed in Thailand, Nepal, Indonesia, and Lao PDR, some Asian countries also adopted provisions neglecting women’s rights (Indonesia, Myanmar and Philippines) or failing to protect women’s rights for implementation by removing requirements to include women in land registration (Lao PDR). Other countries like Viet Nam and Cambodia diminished community women’s forest rights through regressive legal reforms.
Compared to other regions, Latin America shows the least adequate protection for the rights of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women. Particularly little progress was made for community women, with only two countries (Mexico and Peru) seeing positive reforms for women’s voting rights. The stagnancy in recognizing community women’s rights fails to reflect the reality of their struggles, contributions, and sacrifices in the region. However, Latin America is also the only region to see no legislative rollbacks in the recognition of community women’s forest rights between 2016 and 2024.
“Community women play an essential role in managing forests and natural resources around the world. We cannot be left behind in the laws and policies that affect us,” said Ketty Marcelo Lopez, a Peruvian leader from the Asháninka Indigenous community of Pucharini, President of the National Organization of Andean and Amazonian Indigenous Women of Peru (ONAMIAP), and member of WiGSA.
“Gender-transformative reforms recognizing the distinct rights of Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women must be a priority on paper and in practice if we have any hope of achieving the 2030 Agenda in the next five years.”
