The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the World Bank released a report Saturday noting land ownership for women still lags in the western Balkans, according to the Albanian Telegraphic Agency (ATA).

The report, released at the Land and Gender Conference in Durres, Albania, said, even in countries where clear legal protection for women's ownership of land existed, local customs often continued to work against equality for female farmers.

In many regions, men failed to jointly register their wives on property deeds, which could lead to a woman losing her rights over the agricultural land on which she works following her husband's death, it said.

Long-held customs and traditions often worked against the interests of a younger generation of women as well, with fathers favoring sons, rather than daughters, when it comes to property inheritance, according to the report. These issues are being widely debated in the Western Balkans.

The conference has brought together a wide range of parties to discuss concerns about low levels of female land ownership in Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Macedonia, Montenegro, Serbia and Kosovo.

The first phase of the project generated gender-disaggregated reports from land administration systems to illustrate the low levels of female ownership by country, province, and municipality. The findings clearly illustrate female property ownership is low throughout the western Balkans, with rural areas performing particularly poorly.

The second phase of the project assisted participants in designing one-year work plans for their countries, and to bring together key players - including senior government officials, land agency staff, notaries, and municipalities - to devise concrete approaches to boost female property ownership.

Despite differences in language, culture, and traditions, the western Balkan countries taking part in the project have worked together to analyze the data and find solutions to challenges to female land ownership in their countries.

The initial phase of the project is only a first step to ensuring that legal land ownership rights protected by national laws are exercised by well-informed men and women in the region. Endi

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