Context and background Land grabbing has been in the news in Africa in recent years. Fertile land is increasingly falling into the hands of national or international private investors. Farmers with rudimentary means, youth, women, indigenous people, and pastoralists are the actors most affected by large-scale land grabs. Fertile land is becoming increasingly scarce and the public authorities do not seem to be determined to put in place safeguards to regulate this situation.

Living customary water tenure is the most accepted socio-legal system among the large majority of rural people in sub-Saharan Africa. Based on literature, this report seeks to develop a grounded understanding of the ways in which rural people meet their domestic and productive water needs on homesteads, distant fields or other sites of use, largely outside the ambits of the state. Taking the rural farming or pastoralist community as the unit of analysis, three components are distinguished.

Value, and its attribution to unregistered land, is important information for effective land acquisition, taxation and transfer processes and a key component of land administration systems.

Fraud and corruption are the main enabling mechanisms for land abuses in Brazil, guaranteeing impunity for land grabbers and other public and private agents involved in these schemes. This is what is evidenced in the research report, “Weak land governance, fraud and corruption: fertile ground for land grabbing,” which systematizes for the first time the relationship between these issues. Thereby, the study seeks to understand precisely why and how corruption and fraud associated with land grabbing occur.  

O termo “grilagem” remete à prática antiga de forjar um título de propriedade e colocá-lo em uma gaveta com grilos para amarelar o documento, conferindo a aparência de um documento legitimo. As táticas se modernizaram, persistindo diversas práticas, conhecidas como grilagem, que buscam fraudar títulos e invadir terras com o objetivo de apropriar- -se indevidamente de áreas tanto públicas quanto particulares, muitas vezes com o auxílio de agentes corruptos, sejam eles da esfera pública ou privada.

These messages were developed based on the field experience in fragile and crisis affected contexts of UN-Habitat and the partners of the Global Land Tool Network and the HLP Area of Responsibility of the Global Protection Cluster. They are a quick reference on how to empower women and protect their housing, land and property rights in fragile and crisis affected contexts and why this is an essential element to sustain peace and stability.

Gender and land rights are closely intertwined with each other. Globally, more than 400 million women work in agriculture. Women comprise 43 percent of the agricultural labor force in developing countries, yet they account for less than 20 percent of landholders (FAO 2011). These disparities are even higher in some regions. In Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia, 60 to 70 percent of employed women work in agriculture, with similar rates of land ownership (that is, less than 20 percent).

The paper aims to understand what land rights women have under formal and customary legal systems in pastoral areas in Ethiopia;how these are implemented and what their impact is;and to make recommendations for their convergence. It focuses on two pastoral regions: Afar and Oromia national regional states. The research revealed that there is a high disparity between what the law says and what is being practiced on the ground as far as women’s land rights in pastoral areas are concerned.

La lucha de las mujeres por el acceso a la tierra es una cuestión de vieja data en la región. Factores históricos, políticos y socioculturales han sido parte de las barreras que han impedido a las mujeres, la tenencia y manejo de la tierra. Pero en las últimas décadas muchas de estas mujeres se han organizado para luchar con más fuerzas por este derecho.

Aunque la dinámica, los procesos y el contexto son diferentes, la lucha siempre es la misma: hacer realidad el derecho de las mujeres a tener su propia tierra.

In this introductory video to the Global Programme Responsible Land Policy answers are given to what it wants to achieve, how it works and why land rights are so important. The Global Programme is commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), co-funded by the European Union and works in Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ethiopia, Laos, Madagascar, Peru (completed in 2021), Uganda and Paraguay (completed in 2018).