April 30, 2020 (Ezega.com) -- The Addis Ababa City Government has demolished dozens of homes belonging to day laborers over the past three weeks, rendering at least 1,000 people homeless amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Amnesty International said on Wednesday.

Most of those whose homes have been destroyed recently lost their jobs due to the ongoing COVID-19 shutdowns told Amnesty International that they are now also having sleepless nights as authorities repeatedly confiscate tarpaulin or plastic sheeting they are using to shelter against heavy rains.

Urban land

Our urban land pages have been filled with the struggles of people living in townships and informal settlements during the pandemic. One of the controversial state responses to Covid 19 has been to propose the ‘thinning’ of densely settled areas in a bid to slow the speed of community viral transmission. These plans have been met with scepticism by residents of informal settlements who argued that such measures, taken without adequate consultation, would meet with resistance and be destined for failure.

“If you are stealing something it’s better if it’s small and hideable or something you can eat quickly and be done with, like guavas. That way, people can’t see you, be reminded that you are a shameless thief. It is still debatable as to why the white people were trying to do in the first place, stealing not just a tiny piece but a whole country. Who can ever forget you stole something like that?” We need new Names by NoViolet Bulawayo

Imagine a community of 200,000. Convivial, walkable, six times the density of Manhattan but with a smaller ecological footprint. It provides low-cost services and affordable housing mixed with productive uses such as recycling, farming and trading. It’s a city within a city.

But the streets aren’t wide enough to allow cars. The houses seem makeshift and the drains need work. The adaptations make it look like a place under perpetual construction.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, indigenous pygmy communities displaced from their lands for “conservation” and a community leader imprisoned for defending their rights

She’d lived on this historically black D.C. block for 40 years. Now the city she knew was vanishing, and so was her place in it.

She was moving slowly, but she needed to speed up. Her blue sandals clicked on the hardwood floor, echoing off the empty green walls of the two-bedroom rent-controlled apartment in Northwest Washington where she had spent the past 40 years of her life. Reluctantly, she spun from one room to the next, packing boxes, folding sheets, unfolding sheets, opening cupboards, closing cupboards, doing a mental inventory.

The Caledon and Vaal rivers have Sesotho names that are very instructive. The Caledon is Mohokare and the Vaal is Lekoa.

Soweto, our melting pot of nations, in part is a result of this naming. The ubiquitous migratory labour system between SA and Lesotho has a long history.

It affects Lesotho more than any country in the SADC region in which Lesotho's only neighbour is SA.

Countries and regions devastated by war and civil strife remain fragile and vulnerable for decades after the fighting has ceased. In this post-conflict period, as social, political, and economic institutions are rebuilt, reconfigured or established anew, land is increasingly acknowledged as not only a key driver or root cause for conflicts, but as a critical factor for relapse and a bottleneck to recovery.

Indigenous communities in Nicaragua are facing violence and displacement, but agroecology is helping empower the Miskito people.

What do you do when your access to rivers, sacred sites, and forests, is cut off, especially when your whole identity has grown from a spiritual connection to nature?

When you face displacement from your native lands, discrimination, and human rights abuses, how do you survive?

This article was first published at The Lush Times.

Having a title, deed or lease is the key that turns informal occupants into citizens, yet 70 percent of the world's people still live without documented property rights

The lack of a strong land record keeping system is partially responsible for the slow recovery from Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico. With as many as 700,000 households lacking clear titles to land and homes, aid to rebuild properties has been denied to many.

Este miércoles en la sede de la Comisión de la Verdad se llevó a cabo el seminario ‘Despojo de tierras’, que contó con la participación de los expertos en el tema de tierras Darío Fajardo y Alejandro Reyes y el comisionado Alfredo Molano. En el seminario, se discutió y se aportaron luces sobre la crisis agraria que vive el país, la problemática que significa el despojo de tierras y las expectativas para los próximos años en el campo colombiano.