WASHINGTON, D.C. (September 6, 2023)—Rights and Resources Group (RRG) is pleased to announce that it has acquired the LandWise Law Library, a key digital compilation of laws, articles, and research on women’s land rights and tenure.  

The LandWise Law Library was launched over 10 years ago as part of the early work of the Landesa Center for Women’s Land Rights to support legal and policy changes for women, especially related to Family Law. In 2015, it moved to Resource Equity, a non-profit team of gender and land tenure lawyers who advocated for legal, policy, and social change for women’s land and resource rights. Resource Equity recently closed its doors to pursue other opportunities. 

RRG is the Washington-based coordinating body for the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI), a global coalition of over 150 organizations advancing the rights of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and local communities. On behalf of the coalition, RRG monitors legal recognition of these groups’ rights—including Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s—to forests, land, and freshwater.

Users can continue to access LandWise Law Library while RRG’s team works to integrate and expand the library’s online resources alongside its existing suite of online knowledge-sharing tools over the upcoming year. RRI’s Tenure Tool, launched in late 2022, showcases national, regional, and global level data on the strength and extent of communities’ and community women’s tenure rights over time, and will also continue to be updated as new data becomes available.  

Dr. Solange Bandiaky-Badji, RRI’s Coordinator and President of RRG said, “We are delighted to provide a new home to the impressive LandWise Law Library that has captured laws and research on women’s land rights for over a decade. This library presents an important and strategic boost to our existing resources on community land tenure, and particularly to our growing Gender Justice Program which works to secure Indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local community women’s tenure rights, voices, and leadership.” 

Elisa Scalise, a gender and land tenure lawyer and Resource Equity’s Executive Director said, “For years, our small but mighty non-profit has helped expand women’s access to land and resources in communities around the world. As we go on to pursue our mission in other ways, we are delighted to hand off the library’s reins to RRG. With its proven record in advancing and documenting Indigenous Peoples’, local communities’, and Afro-Descendant Peoples’ rights—including the women within these groups—we are confident that the library will be in good hands.”

Click here For more information about the LandWise Law Library and Resource Equity.

For questions on RRI’s resources on community women’s tenure rights, contact Chloe Ginsburg or visit RRI’s quantitative data on women’s rights to community forests.

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