“Land registration and cadastral surveying in much of the developing world has reached a crossroads. It is not possible to continue with business as usual in the face of massive informality within the world's cities, and new more relevant approaches have to be developed”. (Fourie, 2000).

This brief is based on Information and Communication Technologies for Development and Poverty Reduction: The Potential of Telecommunications, ed. Maximo Torero and Joachim von Braun (Johns Hopkins University Press and IFPRI, 2006) "The variety of views about ICTs reveals that their role in development is unclear, especially without convincing evidence of their impact—and little research has been conducted on the direct and indirect links between ICTs and poverty reduction.

This paper reports on a workshop held in Ethiopia in 2004, targeting stakeholders involved in implementing Ethiopia’s National Action Plan (NAP) for the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). The workshop was based on international, national and regional experiences, principles and practices related to dryland management and combating desertification to the development of community driven processes.

UK aid money is creating an "oil curse" for developing economies, according to this new report published by Friends of the Earth, Plan B and Platform Research. Pumping Poverty accuses DFID of an aid policy that is incoherent, fails the people it is design

The Women Advancement Trust (WAT) in Tanzania carries out various initiatives related to land rights, affordable housing, and inheritance rights. This report presents lessons learned from a housing and shelter development initiative. The goals of the initiative were to empower low-income communities, particularly women, to participate fully and actively in all aspects of human settlements development, including the improvement of their living and housing conditions.

Land registration and property rights in Iraq have deep historical foundations reaching back to the Hammurabic period. However, the current land registration system owes more to the 400-year Ottoman occupation of Iraq and the subsequent interval under the British mandate. Under these regimes, land policy was self-serving and designed to maintain and reinforce the existing political power. This was done through the allocation of land to influential individuals who supported the incumbent regime.

We summarize existing theoretical claims linking poverty to rates of deforestation and then examine this linkage empirically for Costa Rica during the 20th century using an econometric approach that addresses the irreversibilities in deforestation. Our data facilitate an empirical analysis of the implications for deforestation of where the poor live. Without controlling for this, impacts of poverty per se are confounded by richer areas being different from the areas inhabited by the poor, who we expect to find on more marginal lands, for instance less profitable lands.

We review claims about the potential for carbon markets that link both payments for carbon services and poverty levels to ongoing rates of tropical deforestation. We then examine these effects empirically for Costa Rica during the 20th century using an econometric approach that addresses the irreversibilities in deforestation. We find significant effects of the relative returns to forest on deforestation rates. Thus, carbon payments would induce conservation and also carbon sequestration, and if land users were poor could conserve forest while addressing rural poverty.