The Land Portal Foundation, Landesa and the Sustainable Development Institute (SDI) co-facilitated a discussion on Liberia’s Land Rights Bill between July 18 and August 8, 2018. The discussion took place in collaboration with the Rights & Rice Foundation, Habitat for Humanity, and the Land Rights Now campaign. 

The full dialogue can be read here.

The webinar on the Land Reform Agenda for Kenya took place on 10 October, 2018. The webinar reviewed the land reform process in Kenya and addressed a range of challenges, with a view to defining a path forward that will lead to equity and justice in land reforms.

The webinar addressed the following questions: 

This report reviews trends since the GLF in Dakar in May 2015 to the GLF in Bandung in September 2018. It draws on 21 submissions from 18 ILC members and three ILC initiatives, covering a total of 30 countries across different continents. The submissions were made in response to an open call issued by the ILC Secretariat in March 2018. They provided insights about some of the issues that members are grappling with.

Transparency International’s experience shows clear links between the issues of land governance, women’s rights, corruption and the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These links are especially prevalent in lower-income countries, where people’s reliance on their land is greatest, and land governance and women’s rights are often weak – as highlighted in our 2018 resource book Women, Land and Corruption. 

The purpose of this paper is to describe and critically examine newer alternative approaches to the securitization of customary land rights in Sub-Saharan Africa with particular emphasis on certain challenges which need to be tackled in order for these to have an inclusive and equitable outcome at the local level. The content of the paper is primarily based on a literature review though the challenges identified with these new approaches are based on observations from the author’s own on-going research on the land tenure reform in Mozambique.

Oxfam India is part of a global movement working to fight poverty, injustice and inequality; in India it works in seven focus state. Oxfam India aims to improve poor people’s access, rights and entitlements over land and natural resources in order to support and augment their livelihoods. Through its programme on smallholder agriculture, Oxfam India focuses on socialising the identity of women as farmers, strengthening the economic leadership of women farmers, ensuring their land rights and making public investments in agriculture accessible to small farmers, especially women farmers.

Inequities in land ownership and access are possibly one of the most common injustices that have persisted in Uganda since the pre-colonial times. Unfair land use policies and practices and the lack of security of tenure must be immediately addressed if Uganda is to achieve its development goals under the National Development Plan II and most of the Sustainable Development Goals.

Oxfam is working in Uganda together with partners to address the drivers of extreme inequality and injustice such as Land.

Investors are buying up vast tracks of land across the developing world in a modern day ‘land rush’. New analysis by Oxfam explores where land is changing hands and why. It finds that investors appear to be targeting countries with weak governance in order to secure land quickly and cheaply – putting the homes and livelihoods of some of the world’s most vulnerable communities at risk. Oxfam’s GROW campaign is calling on the World Bank to lead the fight against land grabs.

Soybean production in Paraguay now takes up 80 per cent of cultivated land, displacing agricultural production by family farmers and indigenous populations and deepening inequality in access to land.

After years of international isolation, Myanmar is liberalizing its economy and seeking to attract foreign investment. But while foreign investment can play an important role in developing the country’s agriculture sector, in the current environment of limited transparency and accountability, an increase in agribusiness investments poses serious risks to the livelihoods of small-scale farmers and others dependent on land.

Oxfam is deeply concerned about the worsening levels of violence, murder and repression against the men and women defending human rights in Latin America. This situation is linked to an economic model that fosters extreme inequality and has a negative impact on people’s basic rights.

It is the result of harassment entrenched in a patriarchal culture, and governments' failure to fulfil their human rights obligations –and the influence of powerful groups on governments that limits their role as guarantors of human rights for their citizens.