This July is the first time the United Nations will review the progress made towards meeting Sustainable Development Goal 15, which is about Life on Land. Each goal will be reviewed about every 4 years until 2030.

The reviews will be based on the 10 indicators countries agreed on, that assess change in each country over time. Two important developments relating to the indicator on land degradation neutrality (15.3.1) have occurred, since its adoption in 2015.

Large scale land grabs are often sites of immediate and sometimes violent mobility, as people are evicted and obliged to move elsewhere. The term “grab” signals abruptness.

Yet processes that change peoples’ access to land, and the diverse processes of human mobility that land transformations generate, often take decades to unfold.  Research on Indonesia's large scale oil palm plantations shows the importance of attending to these long term processes.

The National Slum Dwellers Federation of Uganda (NSDFU) is a network of approximately 350 community groups with a membership of approximately 38,000 people. NSDFU is a member of the Shack/Slum Dwellers International (SDI) network, a transnational network of the urban poor founded in 1996, and which brings together over a million federated slum dwellers in 30 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.

The failure to secure the property rights of rural communities shows a clear policy gap between citizens and rights to land as per the Constitution and the attitude and practices of the state, traditional leaders, white farmers and mining companies in relation to such rights. 

Absent from the discourse spurred by the motion passed in the National Assembly on 27 February is what could be achieved in the interim for land reform programme using existing legislation while the country awaits a verdict on the constitutional amendment to determine whether is possible to expropriate land w

This blog builds upon Harold Liversage's presentation during the Global Land Tools Network's seventh partners meeting, which took place in Nairobi, Kenya from 23-27 April, 2017. Harold Liversage is currently the Chair of the Global Donor Working Group on Land.

This week the Global Land Tools Network holds its seventh partners meeting in Nairobi, Kenya. Ahead of the meeting, PRIndex’s country engagement lead David Ameyaw explains how we will be working with agencies in more than 30 countries to lay the foundations for a global property rights conversation.

Security in our homes matters to all of us. PRIndex data helps show how it matters to countries too.

By Jim Grabham (Mokoro Ltd, UK) with Ezekiel Kereri (HakiMadini, Tanzania), team members of the global Women’s Land Tenure Security (WOLTS) project.

Many of today’s increasingly complex development challenges, from rapid urban expansion to climate change, disaster resilience, and social inclusion, are intimately tied to land and the way it is used. Addressing these challenges while also ensuring individuals and communities are able to make full use of their land depends on consistent, reliable, and accessible identification of land rights.

Momentum is building behind a land rights revolution. Last year, just prior to the World Bank’s Annual Land and Poverty Conference, I wrote about the many factors pushing land to the top of the global agenda.  To maintain this momentum we must pay greater attention to gender and women’s land rights.

Over the last 10 years, a clear consensus has emerged: investments in land should be done responsibly. However, understanding tenure-related risk in the context of land-based agricultural investments in emerging markets can be complex.

For individual women and men within communities, these complexities can have severe and negative effects on their land and livelihoods. This is especially true for more vulnerable members of the community: widowed or divorced women, youth, and ethnic minorities.

There is broad global agreement that secure property rights help eradicate poverty and that securing women’s land rights reduces gender inequality. But our understanding remains strikingly limited when it comes to the extent to which women’s land rights are – or are not – secure and the impact of women’s tenure security (or lack thereof) on women’s empowerment.

This is true even in Africa, where the most studies have been published, due to shortcomings in both the quality and quantity of research on these questions.

By Tim Hanstad, Co-Founder & Senior Advisor, Landesa

This is the second blog in a series of two that are based on a keynote address made at the 2018 India Land Development Conference.