The purpose of the research is to: 1) investigate the interpretation of the sections in the Lands Act of 1995 that provide for the statutory recognition on one hand, and conversion of customary land, on the other; and 2) discuss the effects of the said sections on customary landholders. Methodologically, qualitative methods (largely in-depth interviews) were used to conclude that governments in sub-Sahara Africa are the architects of tenure insecurity because they (knowingly or otherwise) enact laws that are contradictory or conflicting in nature.

Namati’s Community Land Protection Facilitators Guide is a step-by-step, practical “how to” manual for grassroots advocates working to help communities protect their customary claims and rights to land and natural resources.

Download the complete Guide PDF from this page. Or access the Guide as an online Toolkit to download individual chapters.

This input by Dr Aninka Claassens Director of the Land and Accoutability Centre at the University of Cape Town was presented as part of a five day short couse on the political economy of land mining and rural democracy. It provides a detailed history of processes and events which continue to shape South Africa's rural hinterland in the contemprary era.

Due to the nature of available land as one of the main attractions for investment, land lease marketing in Sub-Saharan Africa is appearing on policy agenda. This paper describes critical land-related institutional and governmental frameworks that have shaped the contemporary land governance and land lease contracts in Ethiopia. It also examines the effectiveness of the land lease process regarding economic, social, and environmental expectations from agricultural outsourcing.

For decades, policymakers and development practitioners have debated benefits and threats of property rights formalization and private versus customary tenure systems. This paper provides insights into the challenges in understanding and empirically analyzing the relationship between tenure systems and agricultural investment, and formulates policy advice that can support land tenure interventions. We focus on Ghana, based on extensive qualitative fieldwork and a review of empirical research and policy documents.

More than 200 years after the King sold one of the “King’s commons” of Follafoss (located inthe current Verran municipality) to urban timber merchants, local people in some ways still behave as if the area is a kind of commons. The paper will outline the history of the transformation of the area from an 18th century King’s commons to a 21th century battleground for ideas about ancient access and use rights of community members facing rights of a commercial forest owner and the local consequences of national legislation.

The promulgation of the Kenyan Constitution 2010 brought into place concerns about the urgency for land reform. Land reforms hold the key to solving some of Kenya’s greatest challenges such as landlessness, community cohesion, food security and sustainable development. Land reforms lie at the heart of the work of the National Land Commission (NLC) and Kituo cha Sheria and they are also at the heart of many Kenyan communities who live, work and rely on land. Information contained in the book goes a long way in educating these communities about their land rights.

Well before the effective ending of the protracted Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA)

insurgency in northern Uganda in July 2006, and at a time when the entire rural

population was displaced into camps, concerns had emerged around land, in particular

in the Acholi sub-region, where the war had been most intense and longest lasting

(Adoko & Levine 2004). Through forced displacement, almost all rural Acholi

families has been prevented from occupying their land for many years, years in which

The first set of the land laws were enacted in 2012 in line with the timelines outlined in the Constitution of Kenya 2010. In keeping with the spirit of the constitution, the Land Act, Land Registration Act and the national Land Commission Act respond to the requirements of Articles 60, 61, 62, 67 & 68 of the Constitution.

Government has been implementing the Land Resettlement Programme for over twenty four (24) years, focusing mainly on land resettlement for agricultural purposes without a comprehensive policy and legal framework. This has caused a number of challenges including lack of a coordination mechanism at higher level of Government in the implementation of the land resettlement programme, land disputes and low levels of infrastructure development and service provision in the resettlement schemes.

In the context of the global land rush, some portray large-scale land acquisitions as a potent threat to the livelihoods of already marginalized rural farming households in Africa. In order to avoid the potential pitfall of studying a particular project that may well have atypical effects, this paper systematically investigates the impact on commercial farm wage incomes for rural smallholder households of all pledged investments in the agricultural sector in Zambia between 1994 and 2007.

This report was commissioned by UN-Habitat to review the laws and land tenure of a selected number of southern African countries. It involved the appointment of country specialists who researched and produced country chapters for their respective countries namely, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Zambia. A regional expert was appointed to produce a regional overview to serve as a source document for the country reports, as well as provide overall coordination of the project. The project was carried out over a period of roughly one year, which began in March 2004.