I am Dolene Miller, an Afro-descendant from the Caribbean (Atlantic) Coast of Nicaragua and for me it is important and very necessary to support any initiative to protect my community from COVID19. As ethnic minorities, we are facing a health crisis in precarious conditions because the national government itself has not wanted to assume its responsibility to protect the population from infection, has not issued a quarantine and, on the contrary, is promoting massive activities according to its thesis of contagion of the herd.

The global conservation community now faces the added challenge of Covid-19 on top of a longstanding set of complex conservation, sustainability, and development challenges. In the wake of this pandemic, return to business as usual is not a viable option. The existing systems and structures upon which conservation is based must evolve. Climate change, biodiversity conservation, and poverty elimination efforts have been further complicated by Covid-19, with the brunt of the pandemic borne most acutely by the poorest and most vulnerable.

In central Mongolia, the summer is warm and soft rain falls on the steppes. For herders like Baasandorj, it is a busy time of year, filled with combing sheep’s wool, milking cows and making dairy products for the winter. 

Supporting women’s ability to own, manage and control land will help accelerate gender equality globally

It is depressing, discouraging, infuriating – pick your word – to see the scale and scope of abuse and discrimination aimed at women and girls worldwide.

Many Latin American countries recognize the property rights of indigenous and Afro-descendant people, but those laws do little to protect women’s access to land

Latin America’s indigenous and Afro-descendant communities are facing not just one pandemic, but three. Women bear the brunt of them all, which threatens communities’ very survival.

Globally, the UN estimates that 1.6 billion people struggle to find adequate housing. Kenya’s Constitution Article 43(1) (b), provides that ‘every person has the right to accessible and adequate housing and reasonable standards of sanitation’. Kenyans suffer insecurity of tenure and are victims of frequent forceful evictions. This is a country that never follows up on building standards, leave alone rent controls. The current leadership is money-minded and has no interest in public housing.

"Information is power but information sharing is even more powerful." With this statement, during his opening of the side event on blockchain at the LANDac encounter 2020, John Dean Markunas, Power of Chain Consultancy (PoC) cited me. I am now citing him back to explain what I meant.

Covid-19 pandemic has further worsened India’s hunger and malnutrition woes, more so for the millions of informal workers, now  struggling to meet two ends in their rural homes, post the mass migration from their place of works, during lockdowns. Their embedded informality over labour, land, housing tenure, has uprooted and shaken them with loss of income, occupation and habitat, multiplying their already entrenched nutrition vulnerability. 

Interview with Christiana Ellie, M&E officer in Land for Life Initiative

1) Can you tell us a bit more about the Land for Life Consortium- Sierra Leone?

Land for Life initiative Sierra Leone, is an endeavour of five legally established  civil society organizations that are working together as a consortium to roll out the initiative in  five districts of the country. These organizations have their own specific objectives around land governance.