This bulletin highlights the breadth of DFID's current portfolio on land and prompts important questions about DFID’s work on land governance in the years to come.

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.

GODAN Action supports data users, producers and intermediaries to effectively engage with open data and maximise its potential for impact in the agriculture and nutrition sectors. In particular, we work to strengthen capacity, to promote common standards and best practice, and to improve how we measure impact.

GODAN Action supports data users, producers and intermediaries to effectively engage with open data and maximise its potential for impact in the agriculture and nutrition sectors. In particular, we work to strengthen capacity, to promote common standards and best practice, and to improve how we measure impact.

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 the idea of inclusiveness in agricultural investments and analyses what ‘inclusiveness’ means to different value chain actors.

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. 

About the webinar

Corruption in the land sector affects every second citizen in Africa, with devastating impacts for individuals, communities and the development of fragile nations. Transparency International has adopted a range of community-led initiatives, which are helping to amplify the voices of women and men affected by land corruption and push for change to systems, structures, practices and cultural norms that allow corruption to flourish in the land sector.

The International Land Coalition’s Commitment 8 seeks to ensure transparency and accountability, through unhindered and timely public access to all information that may contribute to informed public debate and decision-making on land issues. ILC’s Database of Good Practices provides concrete examples and guidance to Coalition members and partners on how to achieve this commitment. 

Community Land Scotland (CLS) has today published ‘Towards Land Ownership Transparency in Scotland’, part of a larger study led by Transparency International to test a framework for assessing land ownership transparency within countries.  The framework was presented at ‘Land Governance in an Interconnected World’, the Annual World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty in Washington DC on March 20^th.

The report was prepared for Community Land Scotland by Poppea Daniel, an independent researcher.   It concludes:

Land is consistently ranked among the sectors where people most often report having to pay bribes to access services, according to Transparency International’s Global Corruption Barometer. The Land Portal has summarised the latest available (dated 2013) global data here, which shows that the incidence of bribes paid for land services can be over 50% in countries such as Cambodia, India and Pakistan.