This brief produced for the Dialogue Initiative on Large-Scale Land Acquisitions and their Alternatives provides an overview of the Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the most inclusive international and intergovernmental platform to facilitate and coordinate work to ensure food security and nutrition for all.

You can get involved in the CFS through the Civil Society Mechanism. Check out http://cso4cfs.org/ to connect with your constituency and sub-regional focal points.

 

[From the Executive Summary] Many poor communities depend on women to grow most of the food they eat, yet women farmers struggle with a severe lack of extension services, credit, inputs, and productive assets. Merely by ensuring women farmers get the same access to these resources as men, the G20 could lift 100 million people out of hunger.

Macha Mission in Choma District of Southern Province, Zambia was founded by the Brethren in Christ (BIC) Church in 1906 and granted title deeds to 3,003 hectares of land by the British colonial authority of the time. Since then the Mission has built a church, a hospital (which today includes a pioneering malaria clinic), two schools, and houses for its workers. A large market has grown up near the hospital, serving local workers and hospital visitors.

This series of briefs has focused on the importance of a legal framework
for land that fosters tenure security for rural citizens and provides a foundation forv equitable and vigorous rural development. However, good laws alone do not assure genuine reform. The effectiveness of a law depends on adequate capacity and the will to implement the law. In the case of land legislation, this applies to both those who claim rights— typically individuals, communities or firms—and those who administer land rights, namely the government and and legitimate non-state authorities (e.g.,

Private investment is critical to Mozambique’s development strategy.
Investment can stimulate the rural economy by helping to modernize the
agriculture sector, provide rural employment, and establish new markets
and market linkages. Private investment can fund the development of

O Rio Zambeze é vital para o desenvolvimento de Moçambique, alimentando a vida em uma das planícies tropicais mais produtivas e de maior diversidade biológica em África. Este Rio, com 2.660 km de comprimento drena sete países e tem uma área total de drenagem de 1.570.000 km2.

Large-scale social change requires broad cross-sector coordination, yet the social sector remains focused on the isolated intervention of individual organizations.

The aim is for participants to develop an innovation plan focused on advocacy for women’s access to and control over land, employing ideas and tools acquired during the Learning Route of the International Land Coalition (ILC - www.landcoalition.org) programme. Four proposals for innovation plans are provided as examples.

The aim was to analyze the obstacles to, and opportunities for women’s access to land, with emphasis on the identification of more effective strategies in improving the security of women’s land rights. This report is a programme evaluation including lessons learned. Case studies drawn from the advocacy project are attached as Annexes.

Advocacy planning is a step-by-step process of analysis and debate that leads to the creation of an advocacy strategy plan and its implementation. The advocacy toolbox guides researchers and activists to walk through steps in identifying and analyzing needs, structural constraints and strategies specific to locale and context. The process includes assistance in evaluating objectives and assessing the impact of interventions. It furthers effective policy proposals, possible solutions and systemic change.

New commercial pressures on land and its impact on small producers is one of the major issues being discussed in both national and international arenas. As foreign states and corporate entities continue to exert pressures on African countries to acquire land for various investment purposes, Tanzania is not exempted. The country is stereotypically perceived as having large underutilized, or rather unexploited, fertile land – the so-called ‗virgin land‘.

This paper presents several case studies to show how the Ujamaa Community Resource Team (UCRT) has been working within Tanzania’s legal and policy framework to support a diverse range of pastoralists, agro-pastoralists and hunter-gatherers, all of whom face fundamental threats from external appropriation of, or encroachment on, lands and natural resources. The work also responds to local needs to rationalise resource use rights amongst competing local groups, such as farmers and livestock keepers.