A summary of IUCN's work with the Resource Advocacy Project and the communities of Garba Tula, in order to secure rights to resources and improve conservatin practices.

IUCN’s work in Garba Tula (GT) through this project has now been underway for almost two years, and to date a number of activities have been implemented in the area. This has included: sensitization and awareness raising of local community members; providing support to help strengthen the operations of the Resource Advocacy Programme (RAP – a local NGO working in the Garba Tula area); and supporting work carried out by RAP members to document traditional institutions and strategies for governing natural resources in the Garba Tula area.

A series of papers on land use administration, land use change, securing of rights to resources and other in Laikipia, Kenya.

This paper presents a discussion of the communal tenure system in Olkiramatian, a group ranch in the southern rangelands of Kenya which has granted the residents the flexibility and choice to pursue diversification alternatives that demand open landscapes.

This lesson brief looks at the government's control of private land use in Kenya. It is part of the Focus on Africa: Land Tenure and Property Rights online educational tool. Like other governments around the world, Kenya’s government has the authority to extinguish or restrict property rights over land and natural resources, including the authority to restrict the use of privately-held land for national and public interest purposes. Private land use restrictions have been used for environmental management and are increasingly being considered for biodiversity conservation purposes.

In the experience of GROOTS Kenya, HIV-positive widows are often thrown out of their matrimonial homes, their land grabbed by in-laws as they are blamed for their husbands’ deaths and/or feared to die within a short period of time. Due to a lack of awareness on land rights, as well as the importance of retaining legal documents to lodge court cases, the ability of widows and orphans to control land and other family assets in Gatundu district is threatened.

Delimitation is the process of identifying the geographic boundaries of areas of land and preparing a record of that information. This lesson brief explains how delimitation helps communities identify the limits of the area they occupy and prove communities' customary rights to that land.

The rise of urbanization and development in Cambodia in recent years has led to a dramatic increase in land prices, with particularly high values for land in the capital city of Phnom Penh. Some government officials have benefited from the high price of land by unlawfully granting land title to private developers in exchange for compensation. Once these officials have granted land title to developers, they forcibly evict from the property existing residents, who mostly come from poor and marginalized communities. There is rampant corruption at every stage of the "development" process.

The Land Law of 2001 was a landmark statute intended to strengthen and protect the rights of ordinary Cambodian landholders. A land titling programme (LMAP) was initiated soon afterwards, with extensive World Bank and donor support. The land occupied by the community of Boeung Kak, in the heart of the capital was excluded from this process, despite evidence of prior residence going back decades. Instead it was classifi ed as having “unknown status” by the LMAP, as “state land” by default, and as a “development zone” by authorities.

In Cambodia, an increasing demand for land has accompanied rapid economic expansion over the past decade, leading to land tenure insecurity for many of the country's poor. Despite the adoption of a new land law in 2001 and the establishment of the Land Management and Administration Project (LMAP) in 2002, tenure problems have continued. The difficulties with land reform policy relate partly to LMAP's design problems and partly to poor execution.

Since the 1980s, while trying to maintain political stability and territorial integrity, the Vietnamese state has strongly moved towards the transformation of a centrally-planned economy to a more market-oriented model, in which private, foreign and joint-venture businesses are increasingly becoming the key pillars of the national economy.

In 2010, the ILC Secretariat decided to update information contained in the 2004 publication, so as to have a new basis to work more closely with and through CEDAW at national level. The update gives more visibility to the CEDAW Committee’s Concluding Observations and, accordingly, also to the CSOs’ shadow reports feeding them. This inclusion offers a more critical and comprehensive, if preliminary, overview of the situation of rural women in selected countries. NOTE: The 2004 publication is also available through this site.