News on Land

2023 marks two decades since the adoption of the Maputo Protocol. The Protocol to the African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights on the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol) is arguably the most progressive legally binding instrument on women’s and human rights instruments globally. A total of 44 African countries have signed and ratified it.

While land that is legally designated or owned by indigenous, Afro-descendant, and local communities worldwide between 2015 and 2020 has risen in acreage, in sub-Saharan Africa the opposite applies, says a report by the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI): It decreased by 2.4 million hectares (Mha) – from 9.6 percent of land across the 23 countries in Africa analysed as of 2015 to 9.4 percent of land across the same countries in 2020.

"They come here promising us everything," said one affected Ugandan. "We believed them. Now we are landless, the compensation money is gone, what fields we have left are flooded, and dust fills the air."

President Yoweri Kaguta Museveni Tibuhaburwa has halted the tabling of land act reforms, saying Uganda has more serious problems to deal with than those issues arising from the current land law.

We are looking for two consultants to conduct research on the land governance situation in French and Spanish speaking countries.

The EU Deforestation Regulation enters into force today. This law prohibits the placing on the European market of cattle, cocoa, coffee, oil palm, rubber, soy and wood that is linked to deforestation.

The rural poor who have weak or no land tenure rights are among the most vulnerable to the direct effects of climate change, both because insecure land tenure reduces the incentives and capacities to take good care of the land to mitigate /adapt to the effects of climate change, and because without secure tenure rights, disasters can easily lead to land loss and migration, also through document loss and land grabbing.

In Kenya, the Mau forest is the ancestral home of an indigenous community called the Ogiek people. The Ogiek community comprises 20,000 members, about 15,000 of whom inhabit the greater Mau Forest Complex, a land mass of about 400,000 hectares. 

Excessive and erratic rainfall has caused devastating flooding, hitting parts of Bangladesh hard. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina has said there will be no quick respite for the country.