Gender equality guidelines will motivate Zambia’s traditional leaders to champion women’s rights in land and resource management

Indigenous Peoples look after their land, protect the environment and food sources, and can be a bulwark against global disease by ensuring biodiversity and proper management of forests.

But they remain under sometimes violent threat, are often treated as after-thoughts in international policy planning, and generally see their rights taking second-place to global demands, including environmental protection.

Dear Friends and Colleagues:

We all know that 2021 was another challenging year for the world. It is all the sweeter that I find much to celebrate within the Land Portal community.

Our global partnerships have become stronger. User trust and satisfaction in the Portal are at their highest. Open data principles and concepts are becoming better understood. The land sector has made great strides in contextualizing key land issues vis-a-vis climate change, gender equity, and indigenous rights, among other issues.

The Land Portal works to embed land governance in open data discussions and vice versa. This primer is extracted from the recently published Open Up Guide for Land Governance.

First, What is Open Data?

Three new case studies show: In the context of large-scale land investments in Africa, human rights violations and social as well as environmental damages are the rule, not the exception. The message of the studies is therefore clear: development banks and their governments must do more for human rights and take responsibility for damages caused.

Curating land information is part of our daily work in the Land Portal. It includes selecting, categorizing, and enriching information with analysis and/or additional data, graphic visualizations, etc. In times with so much information available to choose from, people are increasingly seeking sources that offer selections of high-quality knowledge and provide analysis that make sense of it. Understanding how partners in the land community are meeting this demand is a great source for us to improve our work of curating, and providing meaning to land data.

Land tenure—the formal and informal relationship individuals and groups form with land—effectively determines who uses what land under which conditions. Tenure security is important to promote rural resilience and climate change adaptation, build endowments of assets, and provide adequate housing. But land tenure security is not static.

In Africa women play an integral role in the continent’s agriculture sector, representing up to 60 percent of the agricultural labour force in some countries. In Tanzania, agriculture accounts for the largest share of employment, more than 80 percent of women are engaging in agricultural activities and subsequently contributing to the country’s food requirements.

When the US housing bubble burst in late 2008, it dragged major banks into liquidation and destabilised financial systems worldwide. A long, era-defining recession ensued, ushering bank bailouts, currency crises and austerity measures. Meanwhile, China’s skyrocketing industrial production was shifting global economic power.

Indigenous peoples and local communities are included in the final version of the 26th session of the UN Climate Change Conference of Parties (COP26)’s decision text, a definite success compared to previous years. Direct financing for these groups has also been celebrated as a key success at COP26. However, how much progress was actually made, and which groups were kept on the side-lines? Many challenges still remain, and there is more to be done to include farmers’ voices in key discussions and decision-making.