Land Tenure Service (SDAA) of the Rural Development Division embarked on the preparation of a land tenure "Thesaurus", mainly covering the following sectors: legal, institutional, historical, description of space, traditional or written land tenure regulations, topographical, land management, as well as land tenure related information techniques. It is expected that the Thesaurus will serve as reference material both for the normative divisions at FAO Headquarters as well as for field experts engaged in the implementation of projects with a land tenure component.

This detailed timeline provides further background information on the history and land governance of Botswana presented in the Land Portal Botswana country profile 

This is the report of a webinar which took place on 25th February 2021 organized by the Land Portal Foundation.

It is widely understood that effective use of land, the sustainable production of food and development are linked. Yet, creating effective policy, which takes into account broader notions such as economic prosperity and social justice, especially in the context of competing claims to land use and title, still presents significant challenges. The difficulties are compounded by the fragmented nature of information resources about land.

The period for public comments is now closed. Thank you to all those who submitted feedback. The revised version is available here.  

The Maghreb's oases systems provide a major contribution to the region's food security, economy and natural resources. Despite this potential, oasis ecosystems are threatened by a range of complex factors related to the expansion of agricultural land and increasing scarcity of water resources. The project, implemented by FAO in Tunisia, Morocco and Mauritania from May 2016 to December 2019, brought together key stakeholders to address the lack of available information on the status of oases and to advocate on factual bases shared by all stakeholders and verifiable in the field.

Long-term, sustainable and responsible ways to access and share data are fundamental to all efforts to support sustainable development and particularly salient to improving land governance and securing land rights for landless and vulnerable people. The COVID-19 pandemic has unequivocally demonstrated that the need for land rights has never been greater, as governments have shut down land administration systems and rolled back regulations protecting vulnerable communities.

The Global Programme 'Responsible Land Policy' (GPRLP) is part of the Special Initiative 'One World, No Hunger' of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), which aims to reduce extreme poverty and hunger.

In Laos, the ‘Enhanced Land Tenure Security Project’ (ELTeS) supports five provinces in Northern Laos in securing land user and land ownership rights. The project has supported the expansion of the use of a comprehensive, electronic and user-friendly cadastre management system, the so-called ‘LaoLandReg’ (LLReg) in all provinces of Lao PDR.

In many countries around the world, the land administration system deals only with formal land rights, often subject to legislation passed during the colonial period. Formal or statutory tenure is where a landholder’s rights are specified in the law. This enables the owner(s) or rightholder(s) to rely on the law to defend his or her rights. But the poor often hold their land through customary or informal tenure systems which are often not recognized in law or in practice and therefore they lack the tenure security provided by the law.

The Global Programme 'Responsible Land Policy' (GPRLP) is part of the Special Initiative 'One World, No Hunger' of the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ), which aims to reduce extreme poverty and hunger.

Letter from the Team Leader

The Land Portal Foundation is proud to support land stakeholders around the world to nurture a growing information ecosystem that is informing and improving land-related decision-making, policy, and practice at all levels.

Evaluation and assessment of land administration system (LAS) has been getting more attention over the last few years. Different assessment approaches have been tried across land administration systems at international level to assess the performance of these systems, but the attention is given to only those parameters which are common to all these systems. In some cases, legal and technical parameters are considered while institutional and organisational parameters got more attention in others.