This briefing paper is an outcome of the project "Strengthening the Documentation and Advocacy Capacity of Indigenous Women for the Advancement of their Rights and Welfare on Land" implemented in Cambodia, India and Indonesia in 2013-2014.

In 1998 GIZ (former GTZ) published the “Guiding Principles on Land Tenure in Development Cooperation” in the form of a handbook. The publication enjoyed a warm reception and quickly became a source book among land experts and practitioners in Germany and abroad.

Since then the relevance, sensibility and complexity of land policy and land tenure issues have even increased, among other reasons, due to a new wave of strengthened interest in land and agriculture as an investment opportunity, a situation often referred to as “land grabbing”.

Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact (AIPP) would like to provide the following recommendations to the 42nd session of the SBSTA:

 It is well recognized that secure land and property rights for all are essential to reducing poverty because they underpin economic development and social inclusion. Secure land tenure and property rights enable people in urban and rural areas to invest in improved homes and livelihoods. Although many countries have completely restructured their legal and regulatory framework related to land and they have tried to harmonize modern statutory law with customary ones, millions of people around the world still have insecure land tenure and property rights.

LPI Goal 

The principle goal of the LPI is “to assist member states in the implementation of the AU Declaration on land Issues and challenges in Africa, in accordance with the Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa, in order to achieve socio-economic development, peace and security, and environmental sustainability” 

Declaration on land issues and challenges in Africa

Assembly/AU/Decl.1(XIII) Rev.1

This video presents the experiences of small scale women and men farmers, fishers, and indigenous peoples with agricultural land investments and their impact on their lives and livelihoods.

Over the past thirty years, most of
Sub-Saharan Africa has seen rapid population growth, poor
agricultural performance, and increasing environmental
degradation. Why do these problems seem so intractable? Are
they connected? Do they reinforce each other? If so, what
are the critical links? This book tests the hypothesis that
these phenomena are strongly interrelated. The finding -
that this nexus is very much at work in Sub-Saharan Africa -

Buying, selling and mortgaging farmland
are still rare in Eastern and Central Europe. Not
surprisingly, given the level of risk in many of these
countries, short-term transactions, especially leasing, are
more common. These short-term transactions do almost as well
as land sales in allocating resources. Making them more
secure by improving simple registration and enforcement
systems and increasing public access to information on what

Research has had a powerful impact on
policy in Uganda, affecting the climate of opinion,
improving the quality of the policy debate, and helping
focus public policy and intervention on poverty reduction.
Uganda s successful use of knowledge and research to help
set public policy priorities demonstrates that even a poor
post conflict country can, in a relatively short period of
time, create an effective information base and feedback

The characteristics of indigenous groups
make participatory approaches especially critical to
safeguarding their interests int he development process.
Such approaches, recognizing the right of indigenous peoples
to participate actively in planning their own futures, are
supported by major donors and international organizations,
including the World Bank, but have proved very difficult to
implement. They call for changes in attitudes, policies and

Countries receiving debt relief under the Heavily Indebted Poor Countries initiative will be among the first to benefit from the new World Bank -- International Monetary Fund approach to strengthening the impact on poverty of concessional assistance in low-income countries. The new approach features a more inclusive and participatory process for helping recipient countries develop poverty reduction strategies. From these strategies, joint Poverty Reduction Strategy Papers (PRSPs) will bring together the country's own priorities and Bank-Fund assistance to the country.