This paper analyses the livelihoods of the Borana pastoral communities of Southern Oromiya in Ethiopia. It aims to inform policy makers, donors, and development practitioners about the best strategies for protecting and promoting sustainable livelihoods in the region. The study is based on survey data from participatory research carried out in three communities, as well as stakeholder consultations at district and regional levels.

This collection of briefing papers summarises select papers presented at the workshop: "Land Rights for African Development: From Knowledge to Action" held in November 2005.

Assesses the ongoing land registration process in the Amhara Region and its outcomes for women. The paper finds that while land policy and registration procedures aim to guarantee women’s access to land, practice on the ground suggests more needs to be done to support women’s rights in the implementation process.Land registration, initiated in 2003, stipulates that both spouses should be named on the certificate.

Assesses the process of rural land registration in Ghana and its outcomes for poor and marginalised groups.In Ghana, deeds registration has been in place since colonial times, and enables right holders to record their land transactions. However, very little rural land has actually been affected by this registration process. The research shows a general lack of awareness of the registration process among the majority of cash and food crop farmers. High monetary and transaction costs and a long and cumbersome process also constrain use of deeds registration.

Sharp inequalities in the distribution of land remains a major cause of extreme poverty in many developing countries. Some instances are the result of ownership patterns inherited from colonial administrations, others are linked to the struggle for economic prosperity in the post-independence era.Landlessness is therefore a significant problem for the rural poor. Most remedies that have been undertaken previously have not yielded positive results, as can be witnessed in Southern Africa today.

The 1998 Land Act represents one of the most important pieces of legislation in Uganda, which is predominantly an agricultural country. The role of a consortium of NGOs, The Uganda Land Alliance (ULA), is analysed in this paper, with regard to the enactment of the Act. The issues addressed include:

Report finds that land rights in Ethiopia are highly insecure, and higher tenure security and transferability could enhance investment and agricultural productivity. Trying to identify and implement measures to increase producers’ tenure security could have a large pay-off in terms of rural productivity and poverty reduction.The authors use a large data set from Ethiopia that differentiates tenure security and transferability to explore determinants of different types of land-related investment and its possible impact on productivity.

This article discusses the history of land reform in Namibia. The article indicates that at the time of writing (September 1991), it is still too early to comment on the implementation of land reform in Namibia, as it has not yet begun in earnest. Land policy has yet to be detailed and ratified, the institutions for implementing land reform and settlement programmes have to be appointed and in some cases created de novo, and large sums of money have to be found.

In this short, polemical article, the author argues that NGO advocacy groups are acting against the interests of the poor and of international development through unreasonable criticism of the World Bank and similar agencies. The author argues that, in a typical situation, the Bank designs a reasonable project, which inevitably has flaws. NGOs seize on these flaws and add a large sprinkling of inflammatory rhetoric.

The objective of the research that this policy brief reports on is to analyse different mechanisms of access to land for the rural poor in an era when redistribution through expropriative land reform is largely inconsistent with the forces of political economy. The roads of access to land which are explored are intra-family transfers, access through community membership, land sales and rental markets, and government programmes including decollectivisation and land-market assisted land reform.

Utilises a number of situations observed in tropical Asia to motivate a simple trade-theoretical analysis of the implications of technological progress in agriculture.

This study contends that Zambia cannot develop if it neglects policy for the efficient utilization of its natural resources. One such area has been the absence of land policy for effective management of rural land.While failure in this area has been attributed to a number of factors, notably absence of credit and funding, this paper contends that the base factor is the absence of efficient land management for rural land.This paper attempts to show that rural land in Zambia remains undeveloped for a number of reasons:The absence of an institutional framework to guide land administration.