Our blogs on Land

This coming weekend, Openhack will be hosting Openhack Gothernburg 2019.  Openhack is a collaborative community where ideas and knowledge are exchanged in order to solve humanitarian challenges through open source development.  Hackathons are physical meetings that take place and innovations are sparked to life. This is where tech volunteers, aid organizations, social actors, and sponsors together in the same building to work together.

Across the globe, indigenous and rural women make invaluable contributions to their communities and toward global sustainable development and climate goals. They use, manage, and conserve the community territories that comprise over 50 percent of the world’s land and support up to 2.5 billion people. 

The loss of public records and personal documents following the disaster, is already having a tremendous impact on recovery efforts

This week an important new book on ‘The State of Open Data: Histories and Horizons’ was launched by IDRC and African Minds.

By Chris Hufstader

After an audacious land grab by a foreign company, indigenous women in a remote Cambodian village struggle to regain their farms and sacred sites.

Sol Preng remembers vividly the day in 2012 when bulldozers unexpectedly arrived on her family farm.

“The company came and cleared away our cashew trees right before the harvest,” she says. “I lost four hectares of land and all my cashew trees.”

Author: Ahmadou Aly Mbaye

Editor's Note: 

By Deborah Espinosa and Patrick Gallagher, USAID’s Land Technology Solutions Program

Persistent and pervasive gender inequality is a global development challenge that constrains economic growth, educational opportunities, and health outcomes. It jeopardizes food security and undermines poverty reduction strategies. The world over, some formal and many informal laws and customs operate to hinder women’s empowerment and thus their full potential as agents of economic and social change.

In February of this year, a deportation officer of the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency was indicted for extorting immigrants for cash and sexual favors. Arnaldo Echevarria promised two undocumented women “working papers” in exchange for sex, eventually impregnating one of them.

This is just one example of the many cases of sextortion that vulnerable women, and sometimes men, face around the world.