Many of today’s increasingly complex development challenges, from rapid urban expansion to climate change, disaster resilience, and social inclusion, are intimately tied to land and the way it is used. Addressing these challenges while also ensuring individuals and communities are able to make full use of their land depends on consistent, reliable, and accessible identification of land rights.

Posted by Catalina Goanta on Mar 16, 2018 in Catalina Goanta | on The Land Portal Foundation Partners Up with Maastricht University for Student Research Project on Land Governance

Press release

Momentum is building behind a land rights revolution. Last year, just prior to the World Bank’s Annual Land and Poverty Conference, I wrote about the many factors pushing land to the top of the global agenda.  To maintain this momentum we must pay greater attention to gender and women’s land rights.

Over the last 10 years, a clear consensus has emerged: investments in land should be done responsibly. However, understanding tenure-related risk in the context of land-based agricultural investments in emerging markets can be complex.

For individual women and men within communities, these complexities can have severe and negative effects on their land and livelihoods. This is especially true for more vulnerable members of the community: widowed or divorced women, youth, and ethnic minorities.

Por Juliana Martínez Nacarato Investigadora del Programa de Justicia Fiscal en Fundar

La política agrícola sigue sin garantizar los derechos de campesinas y campesinos. Sin acceso a tierra, muchos se ven obligados a migrar y a trabajar como jornaleras y jornaleros bajo condiciones laborales precarias y de semiesclavitud, problema ya denunciado en México pero que no ha sido atendido.

“How can “property” own property?” It means how can a woman own property like land or housing if she is considered as a man’s property herself. I learned of this “phrase” from Tanzanian colleagues during a global team workshop in Oxford, UK, last autumn with the WOLTS project. They shared with me about how women in Tanzania are sometimes viewed by men as belonging to them – as their property! Something I thought was quite different to Mongolia.

WOLTS stands for Women’s Land Tenure Security.

The First Arab Land Conference took place in Dubai early last week, from the 26-28 February.  The first of its kind, it gathered land experts from across the region and beyond, in what was a fruitful and long overdue event in the region.  For those of us just returning from the three-day event, we know that there was no lack of key and empowering messages, as well as carefully thought-out and innovative ideas for the way forward.  If we take a moment, however, to get down to the fundamentals and to find one take-away, it would most likely be the following: each and every one of us has a rig

Liberia in the 1990s was a place of turmoil, host to a brutal civil war that would kill at least 250,000 people and leave many thousands more displaced.

The war uprooted Martha* from her farm in Lofa County. Her husband, Joseph, was a rebel fighter aligned with one of the factions vying for control, and had taken her and the couple’s four children away from the family’s land, to a city closer to the rebels’ base.

On the day in 1996 that he was killed, Martha felt her own life slipping away.

It would be an understatement to say that the first Arab Land Conference was a busy one.  The afternoon of the conference’s last day, however, featured the Land Portal’s very own masterclass on Women, Social media and Their Access to Land in the Arab World.  Never has women’s use of social media been more pertinent.  In the past year alone, we have seen the rise of the #metoo movement, spearheaded by and for women globally, as well as Saudi women taking their rightful place on social networks, with the explosion of various famous hashtags including #women2drive, #Idrivemyself, #sto

There is broad global agreement that secure property rights help eradicate poverty and that securing women’s land rights reduces gender inequality. But our understanding remains strikingly limited when it comes to the extent to which women’s land rights are – or are not – secure and the impact of women’s tenure security (or lack thereof) on women’s empowerment.

This is true even in Africa, where the most studies have been published, due to shortcomings in both the quality and quantity of research on these questions.

From the 26-28 of February, 2018, the First Arab Land Conference, organized by UN Habitat, the World Bank, the Global Land Tool Network, the League of Arab States, the Arabian Union for Surveying and the Dubai Land Department took place in Dubai.  Taking place in one of the most quickly developed parts of the region, the palpable enthusiasm felt throughout the event was because it truly was the first of its kind.  No other conference has yet brought together land experts from around the Arab world.

In the effort to address global sustainability challenges affecting people, prosperity, and planet, in 2015, Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted by the global community to replace the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). SDGs have recognized women’s land rights as opposed to its predecessor, MDGs. Of over 230 indicators, three are on women’s land rights and seven are generally on land rights.