Freetown, August 8, 2022 – Sierra Leone’s Parliament has passed two groundbreaking bills that transform communities’ ability to protect their land rights and the environment. The new legislation serves as a model for the rest of the world.

Passed by unanimous votes, the Customary Land Rights and National Land Commission Acts will, among other things:

The Netherlands Agency for Enterprise and Development (RVO) is pleased to announce its collaboration with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (EKN) in Bamako, SNV, the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), the University of Legal and Political Sciences of Bamako and the National Coordination of Peasant Organizations for implementation of a LAND-at-scale project in Mali "Strengthening local capacities to manage land conflicts and protect customary rights". The intervention will run until 2023 and has a budget of €1.3 million.

ONE year ago, on July 27, 2020, three tribes who live around the border between Indonesia’s Kampung Naga area in Boven Digoel, Papua, and Kampung Kuem in Papua New Guinea, sent a claim letter to Tunas Timber Lestari. Representatives of the Kuranop, Ekogi, and Gembenop tribes protested against operations carried out by the subsidiary of the Korindo Group, as it infringed their customary land.

(Main photo: A tribal jirga in the southeastern Afghan province of Khost)

Mohammad Ayaz lost two family members last summer in a clash with a rival family over an irrigation channel in southeastern Afghanistan.

A Recent Victory

In September 2020, President Mokgweetsi Masisi amended the 2015 Land Policy to give married women in Botswana the right to own land. Previously, married women were only eligible to own land if their husbands did not. The policy excluded not only married women but widows and single mothers as well, which left millions of women affected.

Like different land management systems across the world, land management systems varied in different territories. 

Global Land Alliance seeks a dynamic, highly motivated and self-propelled consultant to engage with a wide range of regional stakeholders to increase engagement with the Prindex initiative, encourage the utilization of its research findings for policy reform, and expand the initiative in specific countries. This role will require near full time effort for a 12-month period, with the possibility of contract renewal for another 12 months.

The Hadzabe people of northern Tanzania are one of the world’s oldest communities. Living at the base of the Rift Valley, believed to be the origin of human species, the Hadzabe live as they always have.

For tens of thousands of years, the Hadzabe have hunted and gathered food in their forests. There has never been a single account of famine.

BAGAYO PETRO, Hadzabe, Yaeda Valley, Tanzania