It’s been ten years since open data first broke onto the global stage. Over the past decade, thousands of programs and projects around the world have worked to open data and use it to address a myriad of social and economic challenges. Meanwhile, issues related to data rights and privacy have moved to the centre of public and political discourse. As the open data movement enters a new phase in its evolution, shifting to target real-world problems and embed open data thinking into other existing or emerging communities of practice, big questions still remain.

Land distribution is highly skewed in Africa, where women’s ownership of land is a small percentage of that owned by men. Women frequently lack the resources to acquire land in their own right and are further disadvantaged by discriminatory inheritance laws, customary practices and market structures. This report summarizes presentations at the symposium on women’s rights and access to land.

This policy brief is divided into three parts: research findings, policy analysis, and recommendations. Daily political and social processes determine what Kenya and Kenyans are becoming. The place where this becoming started was with colonial conquest and the resistance to conquest. The government needs to build institutions that nurture the direct participation in governance of the country by grass roots Kenyans, as well as by addressing the land question in order to reduce biases that reify ethnic identities and violence.

Posted in: African farm news in review, issue #133

After three days of deliberations on the findings of a decade of research and initiatives across Africa, conference participants presented this series of recommendations affirming women’s rights to ownership, access, and control of land. Specific recommendations are directed towards actions to be taken by governments, intergovernmental organizations, and civil society organizations that focus on customary law; women’s economic empowerment, food security and the environment; political conflicts; and in relation to poor women and urban land.

The paper outlines issues arising in a planning process with a poor tribal group who have no legal title to the land where their homes have been for decades. Families live with the constant fear of eviction, an ever-increasing occurrence in Thane District where land prices are rising rapidly due to proximity to Mumbai. The character of the project was identified and a planning approach and management tool was selected. Six months later, a second assessment was done and project modalities adjusted.

This Working Paper reviews the literature on the equity implications of different arrangements of natural resource management. The focus is on gender, ethnic and economic differences in access to natural resources in Asia, where two-thirds of the world’s poor live. First, the importance of common pool resources for the poor, women and minority groups is set out along with the implications of reduced or lost access to these resources.

This policy brief presents strengths and weaknesses of state and traditional land justice institutions in relation to access, costs and speed in concluding the process of resolving land cases. In the current legal and institutional framework, strengthening of the customary justice system would bring benefits. With 93% of land in the Northern and Eastern regions under customary tenure, the most important institution is the clan, yet clan rulings are most often ignored by a parallel state system.