The Cameroonian government’s decision to reform the land legal framework is an opportunity to provide real protection for rural land tenure rights, in a context where major investments and projects are increasing tenure insecurity across the country. Responding to an invitation from the administration to help design this new framework, civil society stakeholders have issued multiple proposals over the years on the topics they think should be included in the new land law. The LandCam project has documented, analysed and consolidated these proposals.

This is the report of a webinar which took place on 25th February 2021 organized by the Land Portal Foundation.

Benin introduced new instruments to register customary land rights in the 2013 Land and Domain Law, which was updated in 2017. The BMZ supported “Promotion d’une Politique Foncière Responsable (ProPFR)” project is testing these instruments together with scalable implementation modalities in the Borgou department (Benin). This work is complemented with a rigorous impact evaluation to assess changes in tenure security, agricultural investments and food security. The baseline survey was completed in 2018 and includes 2,968 households in 53 villages in the Borgou.

Improvement of Land Governance in Uganda (ILGU) is a project implemented by the German International Cooperation (GIZ), seeking to increase productivity of small-scale farmers on private Mailo land in Central Uganda, co-financed by the European Union and German Government through the German Federal Ministry for
Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).

The rise of urban populations has rendered cities in both developed and developing countries vulnerable to poor health and diseases that are associated with urban living conditions and environments. Therefore, there is a growing consensus that while personal factors are critical in determining health, the urban environment exacerbates or mitigates health outcomes, and as such the solution for improving health outcomes in urban settings can be found in addressing socio-environmental factors that shape urban environments.

Land, as a factor of production, has a vital role within the agricultural sector compared with other sectors. However, in recent years, land mobility has become a significant issue around the world with increased concentration and competition for land ownership, limiting the overall competitiveness of the agri-food sector and constraining the potential opportunities for new entrant farmers to access land.

In this onepager, you can find details on the LAND-at-scale project in the Palestine Territories. This project is implemented by the Land Research Centre (LRC), and financed by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs via the Netherlands Enterprise Agency. 

As the global population continues to urbanize, increasing pressure is put upon urban centers and the carrying capacity of the already built-up areas. One way to meet these demands is horizontal expansion, which requires new lands to become incorporated into urban centers. In most cases, this demand is met by converting peri-urban land into urban land as the urban center expands. These processes of expansion into the peri-urban, however, create tension regarding land use and land rights, and may foster tenure insecurity if not well managed.

Despite the ongoing land administration reforms being implemented across sub-Saharan Africa (SSA), including Ghana, as a viable pathway to achieve tenure security and greater efficiency in land administration, the subject of land dispute resolution has received relatively less attention. Whereas customary tenure institutions play a central role in land administration (controlling ~80% of all land in Ghana), they remain at the fringes of the formal land dispute adjudicatory process.

The global community is currently grappling with multiple and overlapping social and environmental threats. These include the climate emergency, COVID-19 and the threat of widespread hunger, and the accelerating loss of biodiversity. All of these threats point to an urgent need to restore and sustainably manage land and forests.

The rapid progress in digital information and communication technologies  (ICTs) comes with both fresh opportunities and new challenges for different sectors and actors adopting the new solutions that become available over time. Since the mid-2000s, the global land governance community has piloted a series of open data and transparency initiatives largely based on such digital innovations, aiming at increasing accountability and counteracting corruption in the land sector, both at the local and global level.