A new way of thinking This study reflects emerging awareness of the need to see disasters as primarily social, rather than natural, phenomena. Individuals and societies can act and take decisions to reduce the likelihood of a disasters occurring or, at the very least, to reduce their impacts and the levels of loss and damage associated with them. Disasters are thus no longer being perceived as ‘acts of God’ but instead as something over which humans exert influence.

Community-Led Rangelands Assessment promotes the use of traditional or indigenous knowledge of pastoralists, as the dominant group utilizing rangelands, to guide planning and management of rangelands resources to support and build resilient pastoral livelihoods. Use of traditional knowledge is considered cheaper, easier to use and replicable. It promotes the respect of local communities’ culture and its integration into scientific methods.

This article addresses political rights and identity among Il Chamus of Baringo District, Kenya, a small group of agro-pastoralists related to the Maasai. It discusses an important 2006 judicial ruling from the High Court of Kenya that specified a political constituency and national representation for the community, and shows how the state and its actions undermined its implementation.

This manual is designed to assist development organizations to respect the right to FPIC when developing and implementing projects affecting Indigenous Peoples. It contains a six-step procedure to facilitate the FPIC process while showing its benefits, as well as provides the regulatory framework to be used when mainstreaming Indigenous Peoples’ rights within organizations’ policies and standards.

The food security of more than 80% of Tanzania’s population and the country’s economic growth depend on family farming on certifi ed village lands. Realizing importance of smallholder’s roles in food security and economic development, the government introduced Village Land Use Planning (VLUP) as a tool towards sustainable family farming in support of green growth – a strategy for sustainably improving productivity within degrading natural resources.

This report presents grassroots women’s approaches to access justice with focus on land and property rights in Africa. This community empowerment-based research undertaken by the Huairou Commission and its partner groups across seven African countries – Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – showcases women’s rights challenges and effective strategies to improve women’s access to justice.

How worried are people, especially in poorer communities, about the risk that they could lose their homes or their land? The idea behind this initial survey is simple: to find out if people are worried about their existing property rights or lack of them – whether women or men, owners or tenants, in cities or in villages. The survey results reveal that insecurity of property rights is widespread in India, with about one in four owners and about half of renters expressing worry about losing their home.

Moral Bankruptcy: World Bank Reinvents Tainted Aid Program for Ethiopia exposes the shameful reinvention of one of the Bank’s most problematic programs in Ethiopia. The report also reveals that the US Treasury violated congressional law when voting in favor of this program.

Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide is a step-by-step, practical “how to” manual for grassroots advocates working to help communities protect their customary claims and rights to land and natural resources.

Download the complete Guide PDF from this page. Or access the Guide as an online Toolkit to download individual chapters.

Land-use conflict is not a new phenomenon for pastoralists and farmers in Tanzania with murders, the killing of livestock and the loss of property as a consequence of this conflict featuring in the news for many years now. Various actors, including civil society organisations, have tried to address farmer–pastoralist conflict through mass education programmes, land-use planning, policy reforms and the development of community institutions. However, these efforts have not succeeded in the conflict. Elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa traditional systems are not making much headway either.

The delineation and protection of transhumance corridors are increasingly seen as critical to maintaining livestock mobility in agropastoral areas of West Africa by allowing passage through areas of increasing cropping pressure. Understanding the local politics surrounding the mapping and protection of transhumance corridors is important for policy formulation. This study reports the findings of group meetings in nine local districts (communautés rurales) in eastern Senegal about recently mapped corridors.

This gender-sensitive toolkit enables civil society organisations, women and communities, as well as other actors to assess each country’s current legal framework and tenure governance arrangements in line with the provisions of the VGGTS and the AU F&G.