In October 2016, women farmers from 22 countries across Africa climbed the peak of Mount Kilimanjaro to claim women’s rights for access to and control over land and natural resources. This event coincided with the launch of a campaign of the African Land Policy Centre (ALPC) to reach the target of having 30 percent of all registered land in the name of women by 2025 and to embed women’s land rights into the targets of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
Having and using information has always been a powerful force for change, helping to fight corruption, enabling citizens to participate more fully in public life and allowing people from all walks of life to exercise their fundamental human rights. We live in a time when paradoxical topics such as ‘fake news’ and ‘big data’ are part of our everyday lives.
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Despite the achievement of Constitutional democracy in 1994, 'the land question' is at the heart of South Africa's struggles to overcome the cumulative legacies of nearly 350 years of white minority rule. The emotive quality of land policies evokes painful legacies fuelled by disappointments with the official land reform programme ushered in by the new Constitution of 1996. There is broad agreement that land reform programmes have not fulfilled their aims to significantly redistribute land and productive agrarian capacity, strengthen land tenure for the majority, and settle the restitution claims of victims of land dispossession.
Learn more about the successes and challenges in South Africa.
Rwanda is a small country and landlocked. It covers an area of 26,338 km². In Rwanda, land is an important issue due to two different characteristics: first is that Rwanda is one of the most densely populated countries in the world (416 people per km2 – (NISR, 2012). Being an agricultural country, where over 85% of its working class citizens depend on agriculture, adds more pressure on land as the sole economic capital to the rural peasants.
Learn more about successes and challenges and find more detailed land governance data in Rwanda.
UN member States endorsed the 2030 Agenda and committed to implement the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a set of 17 Global Goals, in a 15-year period. The 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development contains land-related targets and indicators under SDGs 1, 2, 5, 11 and 15.
Climate change can destabilize existing land and resource governance institutions and associated property rights across the spectrum of landscape types. Transformed climatic conditions, manifested in either rapid-onset or slow-onset ways, can change how land and natural resources are accessed and used as geographical shifts in resource productivity, resource scarcity, and therefore land use patterns occur.
