USAID's Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) project has partnered with the Gemological Institute of America (GIA) to provide training to twenty miners in Africa in Spring 2012.
Click Here to read the Press Release from GIA.

With the endorsement of the Principles for Responsible Investment in Agriculture and Food Systems (RAI) in October, attention turns to how to reflect the principles and practices outlined in the RAI in foreign assistance and public and private investments. The United States’ global hunger and food security initiative, Feed the Future, already places responsible investment at the core of its programs--including clarifying land rights and maximizing the positive impact of agricultural investments on women, smallholder farmers, and families’ nutritional status.

A guest post by Dr. Paul Munro-Faure, Deputy Director, Climate, Energy and Tenure Division, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

In Benin, food insecurity is evidenced in the height and weight deficiencies in 40% of children under age 5, the limited availability of farmland, and the lack of diverse produce options in markets. At the same time, where farming is possible, some families who move elsewhere leave fields in their home village unused in order to show their ownership.

Landesa, a USAID partner in addressing land tenure issues, was recently acknowledged by The Global Journal as one of the top 100 NGOs in the world. Landesa climbed to 16 in this year’s rankings, up from 34 last year. The rankings are based on three criteria: innovation, impact, and sustainability.

Policy makers and practitioners face significant governance challenges that must be addressed in order to achieve the successful long-term sequestration of carbon on forested lands.

Kenya SECURE’s Team Leader, Kevin Doyle, presented at Kenya’s International Conference on Biodiversity, Land Use and Climate Change, held September 15-17, 2010 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi. Sponsors of the conference included KWS, IUCN, UNEP, EAWLS, and many others.
Mr. Doyle’s presentation gave a brief overview of the Kenya SECURE Project and highlighted some of the key features of the new National Land Policy and the Constitution as they related to community land rights. He then gave a case study overview of the Boni people living in the Boni-Lungi forest.

In celebration of this year's Earth Day, we sat down with World Wildlife Fund's (WWF) Chris Weaver over Skype to discuss the links between secure land and resource rights and WWF's conservation work in Namibia. Mr. Weaver has been the director of WWF’s Namibia program since 1993, providing guidance and assistance to Namibian partner organizations in the development of one of the world’s most highly regarded community conservation programs. During the discussion, Mr. Weaver shared four key ingredients to achieve positive conservation outcomes:

On April 29, 2014, the United Nations Security Council voted to lift a long-standing ban on diamond exports from Côte d’Ivoire. Ending the nine-year-old ban will encourage greater transparency in Côte d’Ivoire’s diamond sector and potentially move an estimated $12 to $23 million annually from the illicit diamond trade into the formal economy.

In June, Ethiopian State Minister of Agriculture Ato Sileshi Getahun joined USAID/Ethiopia Mission Director Dennis Weller, to officially launch the Land Administration to Nurture Development (LAND) project. The LAND project builds on the success of two previous USAID projects that supported the certification of rural land rights, the reform of federal and regional laws governing land administration and land use, and the strengthening of government capacity to administer these rights.

In Bolivia, where 65 percent of the population is indigenous and 83 percent of the rural population lives below the poverty line, landlessness is one of the best predictors of poverty. While the Bolivian government has enacted policies to improve land access and tenure security, progress has been slow and as of 2009, only 37% of Bolivian land had been formally titled.

On December 11th, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria featured an article on strengthening women’s land rights in Kenya. The article appears in the CNN Global Public Square blog and was written by Tim Hanstad, President of Landesa, a Seattle-based NGO and partner in several USAID Land Tenure projects. The article highlights USAID’s Kenya JUSTICE project, which works with local customary justice systems to improve women’s land rights.