Access to land is key to achieving food security, poverty alleviation, social equity and environmental protection. A brief insight in land governance-related principles and policies of the German development assistance.

Following the end of apartheid, South Africa’s government set itself ambitious goals with a planned land reform. However, there have since been barely any changes in the country’s agricultural structure, and the positive impacts that were hoped for on rural livelihoods have hardly materialised. A critical assessment of 22 years of land reform policies.

The land reform process in Cambodia is full of examples of injustice and human rights violations. Promises to improve the situation of the landless and land-poor citizens have remained unfulfilled. Development co-operation efforts have not changed this either.

A project in Burkina Faso has given a clear demonstration of what supporting family farms can achieve in terms of poverty alleviation and rural development. One important success factor was the transfer of land to farmers, accompanied by a secure land-tenure policy adapted to their needs.

Trees on farms are often overlooked in agricultural and natural resource research and policy in Sub-Saharan Africa. This paper addresses this gap using data from the Living Standards Measurement Study–Integrated Surveys on Agriculture in five countries: Ethiopia, Malawi, Nigeria, Tanzania, and Uganda. Trees on farms are widespread. On average, one third of rural smallholders grow trees. They account for an average of 17 percent of total annual gross income for tree-growing households and 6 percent for all rural households.

The year 2015 will be remembered for the waves of refugees from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region looking for a safer future in other parts of the world. While millions of people crossed into Europe, the international community looked for the roots causes of the migration, recognizing that food insecurity, unemployment, drought and environmental degradation all play a role in the uprising and coalescing of conflict.

This study combines high-resolution, geo-spatial data and household data from the Vietnam Living Standard Measurement Surveys in 2010, 2012, and 2014 to investigate the relationship between environmental risks and poverty.

The project took place in Katima Mulilo and Rundu during 2007-11. The project consisted of 66 township extensions, and resulted in 18,500 plots developed in a period of 5 years. The project was funded by LUX Development, the cooperation agency from Luxemburg, which poured significant funds to make the project possible. One of the innovation aspects was to do the topographic and cadastral mapping in parallel with the layout and design. This was done by teams consisting of a town planner, a surveyor , and community facilitators selected by the inhabitants of the settlement in question.

This report was prepared as part of the
World Bank engagement in the Philippines to support Islamic
Finance and Financial Inclusion. It provides an overview on
the context for the development of Islamic finance in the
Philippines and is accompanied by two focused reports
providing further detail and suggestions on enhancing
financial inclusion in the Philippines through Islamic
microfinance and assessment of the status of financial

This paper assesses the relation between
access to markets and cultivated land in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Making use of a geo-referenced panel over three decades
(1970-2005) during which the road network was significantly
improved, the analysis finds a modest but significant
positive association between increased market accessibility
and local cropland expansion. It also finds that cropland
expansion, in turn, is associated with a small but

Weather risk and incomplete insurance
markets are significant contributors to poverty for rural
households in developing countries. Weather index insurance
has emerged as a possible tool for overcoming these
challenges. This paper provides evidence on the impact of
weather index insurance from a pioneering, large-scale
insurance program in Mexico. The focus of this analysis is
on the ex-post effects of insurance payments. A regression

Bhutan’s hydropower generation potential
raises the prospect of tremendous development opportunities
for the country: fast increasing export revenue, sustained
economic growth, and rapid poverty reduction. Driven by
developments in the hydropower sector, the country has grown
at an average rate of 7 percent per year over the last
decade, while poverty has declined remarkably fast. But
hydropower development also creates significant challenges