New research by CCSI and the Centre pour l’Environnement et le Développement (CED) on transparency of land-based investment in Cameroon. 

In the report, CCSI and CED find that:

• Communities continue to be excluded from decision-making around investments.
• The government pursues a top-down approach to concession allocation and remains reluctant to recognize all legitimate tenure rights.

This independent evaluation by Emerald Network focuses on land rights, access and sustainable use, through an assessment of five companies: the Coca-Cola Company (TCCC), PepsiCo, Nestlé, Unilever and Associated British Foods’ (ABF) subsidiary Illovo Sugar Africa. As a result of the Behind the Brands campaign, these companies have publicly recognized the risk of people being dispossessed of their land to make way for agricultural commodities and have pledged to respect the rights of women, communities and smallholder farmers.

Despite Tanzania’s progressive legal framework on land rights and governance;many women are often left out of community decision-making due to social and cultural norms that persist in some areas of the country. The author discusses a participatory initiative that is helping women make their voices heard when it comes to land governance.

Describes how inclusive technology;a gender-responsive documentation process and shifting gender norms are empowering women through secure land rights. Includes recognising women as landowners;leading by example;securing land;securing futures.

As the global population continues to urbanize, increasing pressure is put upon urban centers and the carrying capacity of the already built-up areas. One way to meet these demands is horizontal expansion, which requires new lands to become incorporated into urban centers. In most cases, this demand is met by converting peri-urban land into urban land as the urban center expands. These processes of expansion into the peri-urban, however, create tension regarding land use and land rights, and may foster tenure insecurity if not well managed.

This paper reviews experiences and development impacts of a selected number of developing countries in Asia and Africa that have used emerging land registration approaches to rapidly secure land rights at scale. Rapid and scalable registration is essential to eliminate a major backlog of the world’s unregistered land, which stands at about 70 percent. The objective of the review, based on secondary data, is to draw lessons that can help accelerate land registration across many countries.

Contemporary discourses on customary land tenure in Africa, and South Africa in particular, have emphasized the socially embedded and flexible nature of customary land rights, recognising these as inherently more ‘pro-poor’ than individual titling. Based on in-depth interviews and participant observations in Venda, a former homeland in South Africa, this paper explores how in the context of expanding commodity frontiers, customary land markets have emerged, leading to de facto privatisation of customary land.

This is the presentation of Dr.  Marcello De Maria, Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Agriculture Policy and Development at the University of Reading during the webinar on the Role of Open Data in the Fight against Land Corruption on January 28th, 2021. 

The analysis revealed overwhelming support for the use of open data as an anticorruption tool in the land sector, but it also found strong evidence for the existence of a high degree of untapped potential.

This crucial report demonstrates how states and other actors are using the COVID-19 pandemic as an opportunity to roll back social and environmental safeguards. In doing so, they are eroding the rights of indigenous peoples in the five most tropically forested countries of the world

Fit-for-purpose land administration (FFPLA) concept is widely applied in the emerging land administration systems (LASs). This paper aims to contribute to the development of evaluation of the spatial aspect of FFPLA. A review of evaluation models for LASs is made in relation with rationale of FFPLA to identify gaps related to evaluation of a FFPLA and to build up milestones and measurement criteria.

A nationwide awareness campaign on the dissemination of information on the Land Rights Act (LRA) and the Liberia Land Authority Act (LLAA) has begun across Liberia with a focus on communication;the laws;women’s rights and community engagements.