This Country Insights Digest discusses the topic of microfinance in relation to land loss. Daniel Hayward reviews three articles on the topic and adds some concluding thoughts and questions. Has microfinance merely warped into other forms of rural credit, where the profit margin trumps all other aims?
Abraço ao Cemitério do Povo Negro escravizado, em Santa Luzia, MG. Foto: Alenice Baeta
Land tenure—the formal and informal relationship individuals and groups form with land—effectively determines who uses what land under which conditions. Tenure security is important to promote rural resilience and climate change adaptation, build endowments of assets, and provide adequate housing. But land tenure security is not static.
Ahead of the 2021 Conference on Land Policy in Africa (CLPA), taking place 1 - 4 November, the Land Portal spoke with three members of the organizing committee.
Dr. Rexford A. Ahene is a Professor of Economics at Lafayette College and the Chair of this year's Scientific Committee at the CLPA-2021.
Over the last month the news all over the world broke with stories about the departure of US forces from Afghanistan and its takeover by the Taliban. Many wonder what the future will bring to those who remained and to those who fled the country. This thought immediately raises all sorts of questions which include 'what will happen to access, control, and ownership of land in states of transition?'
By Allan Cain, Development Workshop Angola
* This article was originally published as part of the online discussion on customary law in Southern Africa
My name is Silas Siakor and I am the Country Manager at IDH, The Sustainable Trade Initiative in Liberia. I have worked on natural resource governance for the past 20 years - with a focus on land and forest. I am deeply honored to speak at this year’s conference to share some reflections based on the Liberian experience and to send a clarion call to civil society, academia, and private sector to step up and do more to strengthen land governance. The future of our planet depends on it.
This roundtable session considered how the ‘practice’ of crisis signals an abrupt temporal ‘rupture’ and how this makes it possible to obscure underlying structures of power, particularly in the context of the relation between land and climate. In particular, it focused asked participants to focus on two questions: 1) within your research, how do you see the politics of crisis framing at work and 2) How might a frame of crisis contribute to reinforcing uneven /exploitative relations.
Key Takeaways
This session brought together colleagues from different organizations working in the broad field of land rights, discussing lessons and experiences from working in crisis mode, in fragile and conflict affected settings. The participants shared experiences, challenges they faced especially during Covid, the solutions they found and critically reflected on shortcomings and unsolved issues.
Recent border clashes between Kyrgyz and Tajik troops, which have thus far claimed the lives of over 50 civilians and military personnel, are the latest skirmishes in what seems to be an eternal pattern of sovereignty-related disputes between the two Central Asian nations. There is a case to be made that the problems in the region, driven predominantly by each states’ respective claims to land and water resources, can be attributed to the legacy of both Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan’s historical position within the Soviet Union.
The third session of the Forum explored the nature of FPIC (Free, Prior and Informed Consent) and how it fits into the Mekong landscape, using case studies from a Vietnamese coffee project, and a company seeking land for eucalyptus plantations in Lao PDR.
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