While the economic growth renaissance in sub-Saharan Africa is widely recognized, much less is known about progress in living conditions. This book comprehensively evaluates trends in living conditions in 16 major sub-Saharan African countries, corresponding to nearly 75% of the total population. A striking diversity of experience emerges. While monetary indicators improved in many countries, others are yet to succeed in channeling the benefits of economic growth into the pockets of the poor. Some countries experienced little economic growth, and saw little material progress for the poor.

Increasingly land tenure institutions are required to support the decentralization of services to local governments. One expectation of decentralization is improved delivery of services by the level of government that is closest to the beneficiaries of those services. While the scope of services being allocated to local governments has expanded, many rural local governments lack the revenues needed for them to fulfil their new responsibilities. This guide provides advice to countries that wish to increase revenues by introducing rural property taxes.

The failure of rural economies to deliver decent work to their young people affects national economies, threatens political stability, nurtures extremism and causes socially and economically disruptive migration. Globally, youth are two to three times more likely than adults to be unemployed.

Violent conflicts typically cause significant changes to land tenure and its administration. A widespread conflict
lasting for a number of years may result in successive waves of displacement of people. People may lose their land because they have been forcibly evicted, or they may abandon their land because of fear of violence. Those displaced are forced to seek land to settle, either within the country as Internally Displaced Persons, or externally as refugees. People living in safer areas may have lost access to their land with the

Over the past decade, stakeholders have made a variety of generalized claims concerning women’s landownership, both globally and in Africa.

This guide is written for people who work in land administration and all those with an interest in land, land tenure and their governance. Although much has been written about the importance of good governance in achieving development goals, there is comparatively little material on good governance in land tenure and administration. Failings in governance have adverse consequences for society as a whole. By contrast, good governance can help achieve economic development and the reduction of poverty. Good governance matters. Land is the single greatest resource in most countries.

This paper reviews the available data on men’s and women’s land rights, identifies what can and cannot be measured by these data, and uses these measures to assess the gaps in the land rights of women and men. Building on the conceptual framework developed in 2014 by Doss et al., we utilize nationally representative individual- and plot-level data from Bangladesh, Tajikistan, Vietnam, and Timor-Leste to calculate five indicators: incidence of ownership by sex; distribution of ownership by sex; and distribution of plots, mean plot size, and distribution of land area, all by sex of owner.

Countries retain powers of compulsory acquisition in order to enable governments to acquire land for specific purposes. The nature of these powers and the ways in which they are used are invariably sensitive and have wide implications, including from the perspective of international agreements on human rights and their national expressions. Compulsory acquisition is disruptive for those who are affected and whose land is taken and, if done poorly, will have serious negative impacts on people and their livelihoods.

The present volume is part of a series of Land Tenure Studies produced by FAO’s Land Tenure Service of the Rural Development Division. Land tenure plays a vital role in achieving sustainable rural development. Increasing technological change and economic integration are requiring policy makers, planners, development experts and rural producers to re-examine the institutional arrangements used to administer who has rights to what resources for which purposes and for how long.

Few development challenges in Africa are as pressing and controversial as land ownership and its persistent gap between rich and poor communities. With a profound demographic shift in Africa from rural areas to the cities where half of all Africans will live by 2050, these gaps will become steadily more pronounced as governments and communities rise to the challenge of growing enough aff ordable nutritious food for all families to thrive on the continent. In some countries in the region, these gaps—allied as they are with high

This bulletin is issued by FAO as a medium for the dissemination of information and views on land reform and related subjects to the United Nations, FAO Member Governments and national and international experts and institutions. Articles are published in the original language (English, French or Spanish).

This issue of Land Reform, Land Settlement and Cooperatives contains an interesting and wide-ranging set of contributions providing insights into land related issues ranging from Italy to the Central Andes, and from the historical development of sustainable tenure practices to aspects of agriculture sector planning. The eight articles featured open with that of Lavigne Delville, which addresses issues relating to insecurity of tenure in West Africa, and identifies what the paths of change currently appear to be.