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.

One snowy winter’s day I went to a small winter camp of just two households 140 km from the nearest soum (district) centre. A dog stopped me getting out of the car for some time but eventually a man came to hold it back, explaining that the man from the neighbouring household was away on Otor migration in the mountains with his cattle. The two men were brothers, and the one left behind, Batbold, was taking care of their smaller livestock. It was very cold in his ger and I had the impression that he had not made a fire all day.

On March 27, 2019, the Research Consortium hosted a happy hour at the 2019 World Bank Land and Poverty Conference. The event attracted a mix of attendees from the conference, including leaders in the field of land rights and land tenure security.

“I am one of the woman-headed households in this soum. I have been a herder for many years. For me life is still good, because I have a grown-up son who can help me. He became a herder when he was just 8 years old.”

Maritza Losada moved to Puerto Guadalupe five years ago when her husband found a job with a large biomass energy company that grows sugar cane. She and her husband purchased a lot in the town’s poorest neighborhood, Barrio Nuevo. The district remains today much like it was in 1995 when the government created the housing project for future agro-laborers: no roads, no sewage, no gutters.

Dear Land Portal users,

The Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure is an internationally negotiated framework to improve land governance.  For those working in the land sector, it is a framework which is referred to regularly. Perhaps this is because the VGGT comprises inputs from over 1000 stakeholders with different cultural backgrounds from all regions of the world. Since its’ inception in 2012, as of today, almost 140 countries have officially endorsed the VGGT in international forums.

Something exciting is around the corner! Our team is hard at work building a spatial platform, fit for the needs of everyday users! We want to be gone with polygons and spatial coordinates being reserved for experts.  What we really want is for conversations around data to be inclusive. This platform aims to achieve exactly that! Read more here below: 

Why a Spatial Platform? 

There is no doubt that we are living in the era of information. Availability of accurate and up to date information, including data, is critical to planning and management, for transparency and accountability.  It can help inform learning and scale up good practices, as well as implementing policy, especially when it comes to land. While it is an often-repeated rhetoric that there is a lack of land data, the reality is slightly more nuanced than this.

This week, more than 1,500 development professionals from around the world are gathering at the World Bank’s annual Land and Poverty Conference, discussing the latest research and innovations in policies and good practice on land governance. 

By Nadra Rahman 

As more aid money is channelled through development finance institutions (DFIs) that support private sector projects, public scrutiny of these institutions has increased.