The Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) has today launched HAKI ARDHI APP – a women land rights reporting tool- in Nairobi as part of its International Women’s Day celebration. The event, which was held at Ufungamano House, attracted close to 200 women from across the country and various stakeholders, including government officials.
The Haki Ardhi App was last year rolled out in Kakamega County and Taita Taveta County and has been very instrumental in documenting land rights injustices faced by women in these areas, including land succession problems, forced evictions, land grabbing, denial of access to their property among others.
The tool, which also has a Toll-Free Text function (victims can send messages to 23583 to report their situation and access remedy) has been so effective that the courts, through the Chief Magistrate in Kakamega, are interested in the data to help accelerate the prosecution of some of the stalled land rights violation cases where women are victims.
During the ceremony, Kenya Land Alliance outlined its three-year plan for HAKI ARDHI APP, which includes the training of training of 20 paralegals in 30 counties, enhancement of its legal aid services to bring pro-bono legal assistance to members of the community who can not afford the services of advocates or lawyers and addressing some of the country’s land and natural resources policy deficits. The HAKI ARDHI APP is domiciled in several InfoHubs across Taita Taveta county and Kakamega County and is overseen by paralegals and legal assistants.
The HAKI ARDHI APP has so far registered 130 cases (both in Taita Taveta County and Kakamega County) out of which 6 have been successfully followed-up and solved.
“Our goal, in the next few months, is to roll-out the use of the HAKI ARDHI APP in more counties within Kenya, so that we can address the myriad of land rights injustices that women in Kenya face. Both rural women and urban women in the country face daily harassment, mistreatment and at times life threatening land rights related violence. It is our aim, to provide a free, secure and dependable reporting mechanism so that women can access the remedies that they so much need,” said Faith Alubbe, the CEO of Kenya Land Alliance.
The HAKI ARDHI APP has been developed in partnership with the Rainforest Foundation UK (RF-UK) as the technical partner and TMG ThinkTank For Sustainability.
Kenya Land Alliance (KLA) is an umbrella network of Civil Society Organizations and individuals across Kenya who are committed to effective advocacy for the reform of policies and laws governing land in Kenya.
The organization was established to create an institutional mechanism to advocate for enabling land laws and policies in order to ensure secure and equitable access to land and natural resources in Kenya. Kenya Land Alliance was formed as a Trust in 1999. It was later registered as a Non-Governmental Organization (NGO) in July 2013.
Our Program Areas are; Women Land Rights, Land Governance, Community Land Protection, Land and Institutional Frameworks and Youth and Land.
Currently, the organization is implementing several key national land rights related initiatives across 25 counties in Kenya. These initiatives include Community Land registration projects, GIS Mapping and Social Cartography to determine how communities interact with natural resources like forests, enhancing the reporting of women land rights violations through our Haki Ardhi digital App, robust public engagement programs that include regular Legal Aid Clinics and initiatives that target national and country government policy making organs to mention just a few.
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