This publication provides institutional investors with practical guidance on how to prevent, mitigate, and address negative impacts on human rights defenders in investment portfolios.

This note is part of an Action Notes series and provides guidance to governments on how to screen and select prospective investment projects to ensure they maximize the social, economic, and environmental benefits while minimizing the risks. It provides investors information on what can be expected in cases of good screening practice.

This note is part of an Action Notes series and provides examples of tools that government agencies can adapt to their national context and use to develop the technical capacity to screen and select investors.

Ethiopia has implemented one of the largest, fastest and cheapest land registration and certification reforms in Africa. While there have been evidences of positive impacts of this land reform in terms of increased investment, land productivity and land rental market activities, the government is now piloting another round of land registration and certification that involves GPS measurement and computer registration.

The webinar Rolling back social and environmental safeguards in the name of COVID-19, organized by Forest Peoples Programme, the Tenure Facility,  Middlesex University, the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and the Land Portal Foundation, took place on Thursday, February 18, 2021.

Global leaders increasingly recognize that land rights for indigenous and local communities are a prerequisite for achieving national and international goals for forest governance, food security, climate mitigation, economic development and human rights.

Opening up land-related administrative data, combining it with data from other sources  and processing and making this data available as easily accessible information for women and men equally could be a means to counteracting land corruption in land management, land administration and land allocation. But does open data and enhanced data transparency indeed help to counteract land corruption?

Despite formal legal recognition of women’s land rights, no government institution is mandated to protect women’s land rights or to ensure their legal implementation and enforcement. The roles of decentralized land administration institutions do not include the protection of women’s land rights. More importantly, District Land Boards only control the allocation of public land and not private or customary. Several land dispute resolution institutions co-exist without clear coordination mechanisms.

This paper studies the impact of land tenure on household agricultural productivity in Benin. Compared to households without land ownership or right to land (squatters), results show that land certificate ownership increases by 0.238 the likelihood of investing in agricultural equipment, whereas customary law ownership increases this likelihood by 0.374. The study suggests that public authorities recognise customary rights and reinforce legal land institutions.

The movement to secure women’s land rights in Senegal needs to take into account the rights of all sections of the targeted communities. Hence, the cases presented testify to specific situations along with evaluations of initiatives targeting improvement of women’s land rights. For instance, much of the quota land allocated by the Delta Development and Operations Corporation (SAED) is either untapped, sold, or exploited by male members of the beneficiary women’s families.

The Land Use Bill objective is to guarantee the continued existence of communal and family land in accordance with the culture and tradition of the people of Cross River State/Nigeria in so far as the culture and tradition are in accordance with equity, natural justice and good conscience. The bill proposes to fundamentally reform the land sector, liberalise state control over customary land, increase accessibility to land, and secure land rights for everyone interested in using land for development purposes. This document is a discussion draft of the Bill.

This report summarizes the implementation activities, “policy intersections” and the subsequent production of a draft model Land Use Bill (LUB, 2018) for Nigeria. This study broadly focused on land use intersections to determine appropriate policy for countering the problem of land rush/land concentration within the context of the previous Land Use Act (LUA, 1978).

The paper examines the pace of land acquisitions in terms of creating legislative and policy options to safeguard local communities that are directly affected, including compensation for land that is taken, and protecting community interests in the socio-economic and environmental continuum of investment projects, from design to implementation. The absence or weakness of formal landholding and land registration systems was evident in most research sites in Isiolo and Lamu.