“We, the poor.” This is how Francisco Chicompa introduces the peasant families who live in Napai II, a village in the district of Mecuburi, Nampula province in Mozambique. The label stuck like glue: poor is what they were called, and so poor is what they were.  Despite this, the land in the region has provided food for him, his wife and his eleven children. The land has provided money to buy clothes and sent the children to school. The land has held memories of his ancestors, which he was of course obliged to pass on, intact, to future generations.

 Soumya Chattopadhyay takes a look at Prindex’s 2017 trial data from India, and raises questions to drive future research.

In October, Prindex will publish our first full tranche of data from 15 countries worldwide, and a total of 33 by the year’s end. While preparing our final survey, we conducted two trial runs, including one in India, Colombia and Tanzania in 2017. That data provides an insight into some of the questions that our full survey data – eventually to cover around 140 countries – may help answer.

In 2015 the UN agreed a new tranche of global sustainable development goals, signed up to by all member states and due to be achieved by 2030. Among them was a target to increase not only the proportion of adults with legally documented property rights, but also the proportion of adults who perceived their property rights to be secure, whether legally documented or not.

Malcolm Childress visited Honduras in April as part of a fact-finding and speaking delegation sponsored by the US State Department.

On the northern coast of Honduras, palm forests give way to white sands, blue seas and one of the world’s most spectacular coral reefs. But, in a story that will be familiar to observers of land rights worldwide, that beauty has brought developers eager to build, and conflict around the ownership of land occupied and claimed by longstanding Garifuna communities.

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OUR CITY: WHY WE WORK WHERE WE WORK

‘Chicoco’ means mud, the black, fibrous mud that people living in Port Harcourt’s waterfront communities cut from the mangroves and throw down on the river’s edge to reclaim land from the creeks. They build their homes on this mud.

Sextortion: referring to a form of blackmail in which sexual information or images are used to extort sexual favors from the victim. One of the biggest challenges for those working in the land and natural resources sector, has been drawing attention to the fact that this happens in our sector, too and most importantly, that something needs to be done about it. 

Twenty years ago, I learned a valuable lesson about the power of land and inheritance rights to affirm the status and contributions of women. My father-in-law, then 80 years old, was dividing his land to his children. In doing so, he made a decision that was unusual for a man in Kenya– he gave a piece of land to me, his daughter-in-law. He had come to believe that it was only just to affirm the role that women play in contributing to the household and caring for aging parents.

Online mapping platform MapHubs has recently launched a new service, MapHubs Forest, which combines automated forest change visualization and alerts with tools for making maps online, analyzing spatial data, producing reports and storing information in a secure online portal.

This July is the first time the United Nations will review the progress made towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal 15, which is about Life on Land. Each goal will be reviewed about every 4 years until 2030.

The reviews will be based on the 10 indicators countries agreed on, that assess change in each country over time. Two important developments relating to the indicator on land degradation neutrality (15.3.1) have occurred, since its adoption in 2015.

Large scale land grabs are often sites of immediate and sometimes violent mobility, as people are evicted and obliged to move elsewhere. The term “grab” signals abruptness.

Yet processes that change peoples’ access to land, and the diverse processes of human mobility that land transformations generate, often take decades to unfold.  Research on Indonesia's large scale oil palm plantations shows the importance of attending to these long term processes.

In the midst of last week's High Level Political Forum (HLPF), we took a few moments out and a few steps away from the conference rooms, to speak with women's land rights defender Ms. Joan Carling.  Having recently fallen victim to unfounded terrorist accusations, along with several of her colleague from the Philippines, her message is loud and clear.  Women such as herself, most particularly indigenous women, will continue to ensure that they are heard.