Informal workers and desperate journeys 

 ‘Corona lockdown’ led to one of the biggest migrations in India’s modern history. Hungry, thirsty and hapless- millions of migrant workers who form the backbone of our glittering megacities- took to the road, on desperate journeys home. These migrant workers are part of the informal economy- toiling away in construction sector and small factories, recycling waste or doing other precarious jobs. Many of them are landless or small/marginal farmers from rainfed farming areas, migrating seasonally. 

The National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) recently released India’s first Land Records and Services Index.

Today we are pleased to mark the official launch of PlaceFund, an independent US nonprofit organization focused on addressing issues of insecure property rights, unsustainable land use, and climate change. Built off a decade as the Property Rights initiative at Omidyar Network, PlaceFund will operate under the leadership of Peter Rabley and Amy Regas, who will be leaving Omidyar Network to run this venture, and they will take our shared commitment to property rights and geospatial technology into the new decade.

Africa remains a net food importing region spending more than USD 35 billion annually on food imports, although this continent has about 65% of the uncultivated arable land left in the world to feed 9 billion people by 2050 (AfDB, 2016). Land tenure remains a major challenge across the continent and only about 10% of Africa’s rural land is registered. In Cameroon, in particular, land as an asset, an input or an income source is not equally possessed by any individual or household with respect to gender and place of living.

In rural areas around the world, the face of a farmer is increasingly a woman’s.

From the paddy terraces of Asia to the maize fields of sub-Saharan Africa, she will till, plant, water, and harvest crops that feed her household and whole communities.

What the US faces on its southern border is not a security problem, but a humanitarian crisis, and punishing attempts at deterrence cannot resolve it. Enabling people to stay where they are requires, first and foremost, strengthening their right to be there.

Welcome to 2019. In San Francisco, commuters shuttle to work in self-driving Ubers. In Rwanda, drones deliver blood to patients. In China, Xiaomi released a $500 phone that allows users to map the world with 30 centimeter accuracy.

And yet, a quarter of the world’s population lacks a fundamental human right: the right to property.

I have talked to women in at least 15 countries—in their homes, their gardens, their fields, their pastures, their universities, their community organizations, their government and executive offices, and their courtrooms. When asked about rural women’s land use or rights or ownership or livelihood, the thing that usually stands out to me is that most women say, in one form or another, that rural women are generally able to use land, and sometimes even control land, when they are in an intact family.

Until today, the world had no internationally comparable data on citizens’ perceptions of the security their property rights; no way of tracking how people evaluated the likelihood of their home or other land being taken from them.

In the village of Katebe, Ugandan schoolchildren have little choice but to drink from the same water supply as animals.

During the dry season from June to August, Kyakatarihwa dam is the only source of water for people and livestock alike in this remote part of southwest Uganda's Mbarara district.

"We have no (other) option," said Arinaitwe Kenneth, headteacher of Katebe Primary School, which has 420 pupils.

New technology has unleashed a wave of opportunities to secure formal land rights for hundreds of millions of people, but it is not a solve-all solution in countries with weak institutions, said a senior World Bank economist. 

Satellite imagery, drones, cloud computing and blockchain are among technologies with the potential to help many of the world’s more than 1 billion people estimated to lack secure property rights, said the World Bank’s Klaus Deininger.