A pocket sized booklet published to make a significant contribution towards creating a just, fair and equitable society in which women’s land rights are more strongly recognised and promoted. Contains a series of issues and principles: discrimination on the basis of sex; land tenure reform; land ownership; trust land; rights of inheritance; succession and matrimonial property; land distribution and resettlement schemes; land markets; institutional arrangements; the National Land Policy; conclusion.

A brief synthesis of a longer report. Provides a micro-level foundation for discussions of land allocation and its relation to poverty within the smallholder sector of Eastern and Southern Africa based on results from household surveys in Ethiopia, Kenya, Rwanda, Mozambique and Rwanda between 1990 and 2000.

Those who led southern African states to independence promised to redress the inequalities of settler colonialism by returning the land to the people. A generation later the rural poor are still waiting. Many lack access and full rights to agricultural land and, as developments in Zimbabwe and South Africa show, they are getting angry. Where did post-independence land reform policy go wrong?

ABSTRACTED FROM THE OBJECTIVES: This paper aims to identify, scrutinise and comment upon the quality and adequacy of different existing large data sets (available from government ministries, international organisations, research institutions and so forth) that contain information on land use, tenure and related issues. It then analyses these data to establish linkages between standards of living/poverty and landholding.

Over the last decade, following the doi moi reforms, the Vietnamese government has formally recognised the household as the basic unit of production and allocated land use rights to households. Under the 1993 Land Law these rights can be transferred, exchanged, leased, inherited, and mortgaged. A land market is emerging in Vietnam but is still constrained for various reasons. Additionally, lack of flexibility of land use is an issue.

Land reform is a many-splendoured thing. The term has been used to include not only redistributive reforms of ownership rights but also the establishment of collective or communal forms of farming, state sponsored land colonization schemes in frontier areas, and land tenure reforms, i.e., changes in the contractual arrangements between the landowner and those who cultivate the land. In addition, tax (and credit) measures intended to create incentives for large landowners to sell part of their holding sometimes are described as “market friendly” land reforms.

It has been argued that many of the poverty reduction strategy papers pay insufficient attetion to the role of land access and land distribution in rural poverty. Redressing the inequalities between small-scale and large-scale farming sectots is likely to be an important element of an effective rural poverty reduction strategy in countries such as Zimbabwe and Kenya.

"The hour of capitalism's greatest triumph," writes Hernando de Soto, "is, in the eyes of four-fifths of humanity, its hour of crisis." In The Mystery of Capital, the world-famous Peruvian economist takes up the question that, more than any other, is central to one of the most crucial problems the world faces today: Why do some countries succeed at capitalism while others fail? In strong opposition to the popular view that success is determined by cultural differences, de Soto finds that it actually has everything to do with the legal structure of property and property rights.

Examines the current crisis in Zimbabwe, the land question in Zimbabwe and South Africa, the two land redistribution policies compared, poverty and the rule of law, populist policies and land invasions. Argues that despite the differences between South Africa and Zimbabwe, land invasions could occur in South Africa because of the failure to address deepening rural poverty and the continuing emotive issue of highly unequal and racially skewed land distribution.

The 1998 Land Act represents one of the most important pieces of legislation in Uganda, which is predominantly an agricultural country. The role of a consortium of NGOs, The Uganda Land Alliance (ULA), is analysed in this paper, with regard to the enactment of the Act. The issues addressed include:

The Kol tribals of Chitrakoot district live a life of abject poverty, exploitation and almost complete subjugation to the feudal landowners, locally known as Dadus. A local civil society organisation, the Akhil Bhartiya Samaj Sewa Sansthan (ABSSS) has adopted a multi-pronged approach to simultaneously address three sets of issues which it felt were crucial for improving the lot of the Kols.

Throughout Vietnam's long histoty, the central elite and peripheraI farming communities have been legaIly and culturally divided. This dichotomy was never as complete as the famous injunction that "the emperor's writ stops at the village gate" infers. InitiaIly, during the period of French colonisation and more recently since the introduction of doi moi (renovation) economic reforrns, central authorities have attempted to unify land management with universaI normative law.