The Land Dialogues nurture a community of trust with Indigenous peoples, local communities, and Afro-descendent peoples by producing webinars that bring unlikely voices and perspectives together.

We often ask for feedback from you. Knowing this takes time, effort, and thought, we are grateful that so many of you do it. We want you to know that we read and hear every single person’s comments. We implement a fairly dynamic feedback loop, but just in case you have wondered how Land Portal uses data and users’ feedback to make a real difference, here is a comprehensive look at our rigorous and participatory monitoring and evaluation (M&E) system. This blog is taken from our 2023 Annual M&E Report, which dives deep into how we collect and analyze data and user feedback to drive impactful initiatives for better land governance.  

After a four-year hiatus, the World Bank Land Conference took place again in Washington, D.C. this May, convening one thousand government, civil society, and land stakeholders in person and thousands more online. The theme of the 2024 conference was "Securing Land Tenure and Access for Climate Action," an exciting and meaningful frame for discussing an issue near to our hearts – open access to land information. 

The Land Portal organized a panel on building a robust and open land information infrastructure for tenure security and climate action in Africa, moderated by Romy Sato. The session featured an outstanding panel of speakers from the public and private sectors representing perspectives on land data from Malawi, Madagascar, Mozambique, Namibia, Senegal, and Uganda.

Celebrating Fifteen Years of Open: The Land Portal’s Journey to Creating Communities of Practice

Since its beginnings, the Land Portal has been founded in a spirit of openness and, with one of its primary goals being providing wide access to land governance information.  The Land Portal, however, was created at a time where the opportunities to inform and open up the debate on land issues and thinking around the importance of open land data were much more limited.  When I first came to know of the Land Portal’s work, long before I joined the team,  social media was still very much in its infancy, the open data movement was just taking off and technology was only beginning to become personal and portable. These significant changes would eventually lead to a world in which technology touches nearly everything we do, considerably changing the nature of the Land Portal’s work.  

Imagine a world where every community has the data, information and knowledge it needs to make informed decisions about the land they call home. A world where the power of information is harnessed to hold leaders accountable for managing essential natural resources sustainably. This is the transformative potential of open and accessible land data in the fight against climate change, which is the defining challenge of our time, threatening the lives and livelihoods of communities worldwide.