- Please tell us about yourself and your work at ILC:
Eva: I’m Eva Hershaw, the data and land monitoring lead at the International Land Coalition (ILC). I have a background in journalism and before joining ILC, I was a researcher in Brazil working on foreign investment in the Cerrado. Across all this work, data and storytelling has been a through line. At ILC, a global alliance of more than 320 organisations working in 86 countries, we work with Indigenous Peoples, local communities, farmer groups, rural youth, pastoralists and women’s organisations towards a single goal: people-centred land governance. Data is a fundamental part of that work, as we support members to identify, centralize and generate land data that can support policy dialogue and change. This work includes monitoring common indicators of people-centred land governance, building tools and methods with our members to fill critical data gaps, but also promoting inclusive land data and indicators within relevant global frameworks. Our data portfolio grew out of a simple, network-wide goal: making sure the people closest to the land are visible in the data.
2. Why is data at the intersection of gender and environment/climate important to ILC?
Eva: Women play a critical role in the management of land and territory, forests and biodiversity, but they are less likely to have secure rights to the land on which they depend. That gap shapes who can adapt to climate change, who is included meaningfully in decisions about conservation and, notably, who has access to finance and support. Official statistics may capture formal ownership but this data is still, often, not gender-disaggregated. And if data looks only at individual titles, we miss an understanding of how women perceive control over the land and tenure security in customary or collective tenure systems. These are the bridges that make women’s land rights a fundamental building block of SDG 5, but also relevant to Target 22 and Target 23 of the KM-GBF, which calls for secure rights on Indigenous and traditional territories and for gender equality and women’s rights and access to land. This data – and the indicators that ground them – help ensure that climate, biodiversity and also restoration goals reflect the realities of women delivering on these commitments.
3. What inspired ILC Foundation Kenya to become part of GEDA?
Eva: Land rights, gender equality, and environmental action are often discussed in separate spaces, each with its own data community. GEDA brings them together and facilitates exchanges and learning across these topics. We wanted to connect land governance data with the wider gender-environment data field, connecting towards joint goals and in strategic spaces and improving our own tools and approaches along the way. GEDA’s accountability to grassroots movements, civil society organizations and IGOs mirrors how ILC works, through its members and their communities. The community has provided important opportunities both to us and our members as we aim to jointly improve our data work.
4. What are you looking forward to in terms of gender and environment data this year (or what really inspired you this year)?
Eva: Over the next year, we have a few exciting projects taking shape. At the UNCCD COP in Mongolia, we launched our first-ever pastoralist land tenure dataset jointly with the government of Mongolia and the Mongolia National Land Coalition – a landmark collaboration that resulted in concrete policy commitments and actions agreed to by civil society and government. We are now scaling this work up in Tanzania and Somalia, in the context of the FAO-EC Programme, where we hope to also have a view of how tenure security varies among women pastoralists. As part of our effort to localize global indicators and fill critical data gaps, last year we finalized a community-level survey tool to collect data relevant to SDGs 1.4.2 and 5.a.1 – with a focus on women’s land tenure security – and KM-GBF indicator 22.1. The tool is currently being piloted in four Latin American countries by our regional platforms Tierra y ODS and Mujer Rural with highly-anticipated results that will be presented in various regional and global fora in 2027.
5. Is there a specific resource you’d like to share with the GEDA Insights Network?
Eva: For those who don’t already know it, I would introduce LANDex, the global land governance monitoring tool built together with ILC members and partners (www.landexglobal.org). LANDex centralizes critical datasets on land – those from LandMark, the Land Matrix, ALLIED, Prindex and the SOLIndex, among others – and facilitates data collection around critical common indicators of people-centred land governance, including those across the gender and environment nexus. Through LANDex, our members can undertake their own assessment of SDG 5.a.2, monitoring the strength of the legal framework to provide for women’s access to and ownership of land, and see what their national governments have reported through SDG 5.a.1. Other indicators assess member participation and the inclusion of land tenure in processes that ground the Rio Conventions at national levels – NBSAPs, NDCs and NAPs, among others. As a tool, LANDex provides an entry point to fundamental indicators and datasets that members can leverage and dig deeper into with an eye to their own national objectives.
