The scale and speed of coordinated land grabs over the past five years has created a new avenue through which people are being displaced and dispossessed of their lands.  This paper looks at what limits international and national law in addressing displacement and dispossession due to land grabs in Mozambique.

Assesses the ongoing land registration process in the Amhara Region and its outcomes for women. The paper finds that while land policy and registration procedures aim to guarantee women’s access to land, practice on the ground suggests more needs to be done to support women’s rights in the implementation process.Land registration, initiated in 2003, stipulates that both spouses should be named on the certificate.

The 1998 Land Act represents one of the most important pieces of legislation in Uganda, which is predominantly an agricultural country. The role of a consortium of NGOs, The Uganda Land Alliance (ULA), is analysed in this paper, with regard to the enactment of the Act. The issues addressed include:

Communities of present-day or former hunter-gatherers live in scattered communities across the world, although their precise numbers and status are very uncertain. Their often marginalised status and ethnolinguistic diversity has made it hard to articulate their case for land rights outside Australia and North America. Their preferred subsistence strategy, hunting, is often in direct conflict with conservation philosophies and protected areas often fall within their traditional hunting areas.

Assesses the process of rural land registration in Ghana and its outcomes for poor and marginalised groups.In Ghana, deeds registration has been in place since colonial times, and enables right holders to record their land transactions. However, very little rural land has actually been affected by this registration process. The research shows a general lack of awareness of the registration process among the majority of cash and food crop farmers. High monetary and transaction costs and a long and cumbersome process also constrain use of deeds registration.

Rural citizens have increasingly begun to invoke perceived citizenship rights at transnational level, such that rural citizen engagements today have the potential to generate new meanings of global citizenship.

This paper tests the role of informal risk-sharing networks by setting up a limited commitment model and using panel data on informal credit transactions from Ethiopia.Findings:enforcement problems limit the direct role of credit transactions in risk sharing arrangements between rural households, whether the villages are ethnically homogenous or nothouseholds with more land have better access to the informal credit markets and access is significantly improved through their participation in small group networksinformal credit market and the networks under consideration serve little purpose t

This PhD thesis provides an econometric analysis of various aspects of the rural economy in Northern Ethiopia.The thesis consists of five papers:an in-depth analysis of poverty, its distribution, dynamics and its correlates within the framework of the role of economic reforms on poverty reduction in a remote, unstable and environmentally troubled regionlooks at the issue of the efficacy of a micro-finance program in reaching out to the poor and measures the impact of program participationexamines the efficacy of food-for-work (FFW) programs in targeting the poor by emphasizing the role of F

This collection of briefing papers summarises select papers presented at the workshop: "Land Rights for African Development: From Knowledge to Action" held in November 2005.

By Samuel Gebreselassie

This paper argues that socio-economic dominance based on ethnic and race factors is a long standing phenomena in Africa, which was instigated by colonial rule and perpetuated by elite interests in capital accumulation and political power during the post-colonial era. The report looks at experiences from a range of countries, including Zimbabwe, South Africa, Rwanda and the Congo.It finds that ethnic dominance-building strategies have tended to focus on the control of access to limited resources.