By Liam Kelley-St. Clair

Contracts between governments and private investors for large-scale land, agriculture, and forestry projects often play a critical role in the governance of these projects. Yet, despite their significance, such contracts are often kept hidden from the public eye. Amongst the many initiatives seeking to shed light on these deals, OpenLandContracts.org, an initiative of the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), works to advance transparency by serving as a centralized online repository of publicly available land, agriculture, and forestry contracts between investors and governments.

By Rachael Knight, Senior Advisor, Community Land Protection, Namati

Increased attention and visibility of land rights issues is a testimony of their critical role for achieving economic growth in an inclusive and sustainable manner. On Friday, April 21, 2017, a panel of policymakers and representatives from development partners, civil society, and academia came together to discuss the importance of secure land rights as the basic building block for other development actions.

Land in Tanzania is a scarce resource without which life cannot be sustained (FAO, 2007), and it is “increasingly recognized as an important governance issue” around the global (Palmer et al., 2009, p.1).  Hundreds of millions of people including farmers, herders, forest dwellers and agro-industries all rely on land resources for their survival.

BONN, Germany, 30 Dec 2016 — According to Dr. Richard Byron-Cox, his admiration for the late President of Burkina Faso, Captain Thomas Sankara, strengthens his role as the Action Program Alignment and Capacity Building Officer at the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) based in Germany.

As one of the founding fathers of the concept of Land Degradation Neutrality (LDN), he believes this can help countries suffering from floods, droughts, etc. be self-sufficient.

By Andy White, Coordinator of the Rights and Resources Initiative

By Frank Pichel, Interim CEO & Chief Programs Officer, Cadasta Foundation

Across the continent, insecure rights to land are robbing millions of financial stability and long-term prosperity. While new technology is giving people the tools to define what’s theirs, governments must recognize that certainty of ownership is a prerequisite of sustainable development.

October 2017: In 2012, the Committee on World Food Security (CFS) endorsed Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure, forests, and fisheries (VGGT, or the Voluntary Guidelines) to, inter alia, promote food security and sustainable development by improving secure access to land, fisheries, and forests.

The 16^th of October marks World Food Day, a reminder to the international community of the criticality of treating food security as a 21^st Century priority if sustainable development, peace and security and the realisation of human rights are to be achieved.

The Namati team in Sierra Leone is engaged in an ongoing effort to discover sustainable measures for community ownership, management, and administration of land and natural resources throughout the country. To this end, we have taken on a new project: the application of a legal empowerment approach to community land protection.