News on Land

This indigenous lawyer has made history as the first native woman ever to be elected to Brazil’s congress. She faces a host of obstacles – but is used to overcoming challenges

Joênia Wapichana was the first person in her family to go to university, the first to study law and the first to qualify as a barrister. Now she has become Brazil’s first indigenous congresswoman.

Large-scale land transactions in which nations sell huge, publicly owned parcels to foreign and domestic corporations negatively affect local women more than men, a new study by Oregon State University shows.

The findings are important because the transactions, also known as land grabs, are occurring at a pace and scale that are unprecedented—at least 45 million hectares, and possibly as many as 200 million, have changed hands over the past decade, mainly in lower-income countries, OSU College of Forestry researcher Reem Hajjar said.

LAGOS, Nigeria, Jun 10 2019 (IPS) - As a wife and mother in Nigeria who wanted to support my family and my community, I began my own farm in 2006. When I began, I never could have dreamed that just cultivating the earth would someday lead to my meeting government leaders, and traveling to meet other women from around the world doing their part to make a difference in their own communities.

ABIDJAN - Every other day, Kouakou Marie Laure wakes up at 1am to fetch water for her family.

The mother of three carries a bucket on her head back and forth to the nearest affordable water source, a couple of kilometres away, about a dozen times to replenish the family's 200-litre tank.

The water usually lasts through two days of drinking, bathing, cleaning, and washing clothes.

MONROVIA – One of the decisive moments in social justice advocacies for land rights in the recent history of Liberia came in 2011, when rural communities, wrote a letter of complaint against the Sime Darby Plantation Company to the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO).

European Union (EU)’s Programme Manager for Climate Change and Rural Development, Vera Kellen, says land rights remain the precondition for sustainable development in Africa and the rest of the world.

Madam Kellen made the remarks on Tuesday, June 4, 2019 at the “Sustainable Ownership, Empowering Community and Civil Society Liberia” meeting held at a resort in Monrovia, organized by ForumSYD. The day-long meeting brought together both local and international partners with focus on land rights advocacy and empowerment of CSOs.

Sourcing products from sustainable production areas and offering farmers better loans for environmentally friendly practices are just two ways to support sustainable development – ultimately benefiting millions of farmers and significantly reducing deforestation

Indigenous peoples own or manage at least one-quarter of the world’s land surface – vast areas that overlap with 40 percent of global land-based government-protected areas, according to a unique mapping study that demonstrates the significant part Indigenous peoples are playing in safeguarding critical areas for conservation. The study took five years to complete and is the first of its kind, using geospatial data to estimate the size of this overlap.

As climate change and population growth bring more water scarcity, drought-hit villages are are adapting - but conflict over limited water is growing

KWAMUSI, South Africa (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - A At the height of the 2015 drought that parched South Africa's eastern KwaZulu-Natal province, Julie Mkhize had to pull carcasses of dead cows from the dried riverbed near her village, after the desperate animals perished seeking water.

Like many other Aboriginal kids in 1938, Isabel Flick was denied an education because she was “too black” to be allowed into the segregated public school.

Her father, a returned serviceman, was disrespected by the nation he had fought for. She and her siblings faced the threat of being taken from their family. She was later called a “trouble maker” for demanding justice for Aboriginal women and children and Aboriginal rights to land.

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The German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) is funded by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) as commissioned by the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) to organize support measures for the "Network of Excellence for Land Governance in Africa (NELGA)".