This paper addresses the disjuncture between women’s formal land rights and their attaining these in practice, examining the four agrarian reforms carried out by progressive governments after 2000 in Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela. It finds that while all four strengthened women’s formal land rights, only the reforms in Bolivia and Brazil resulted in a significant share and number of female beneficiaries.

Secure tenure and registered land rights are widely believed to be necessary for access to credit, well functioning land markets and economic development. As a result Namibia introduced long term leasehold rights over communal and commercial land for resettlement purposes in order to address preindependence imbalances in land holdings. The purpose is to bring the resettled beneficiaries into the mainstream of the economy, but this has not happened.

Land registration and titling in Africa has been seen as a means of legal empowerment of the poor that can protect smallholders’ and pastoralists’ rights of access to land and other landbased resources.

The Kilimanjaro Initiative is a rural women’s mobilisation from across Africa towards an iconic moment at the foot of Mt Kilimanjaro in October 2016. The Kilimanjaro Initiative was conceived by the Rural Women during a meeting of rural women and civil society organisations in 2012, held in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. This initiative aims to create space for us as rural women to be able to participate in decision making processes about land and natural resources.

In pastoral societies women face many challenges. Some describe these as a ‘double burden’ – that is, as pastoralists and as women. However, pastoral women may obtain a significant degree of protection from customary law even if customary institutions are male-dominated. In periods of change (economic, social, political), this protection may be lost, and without protection from statutory laws, women are in danger of “falling between two stools” (Adoko and Levine 2009).

The last decade has witnessed a raft of political and legal reforms in Kenya and the efforts have paid dividends. Kenya is experiencing an unprecedented surge in foreign direct investments in varied infrastructure projects. In most cases the projects are situate in rural areas creating a buzz of excitement and igniting opportunities for poverty reduction initiatives directly or indirectly.

This paper questions the novelty of post-2000 development strategies, in particular the US’s Millennium Challenge Corporation and its ethos of ‘poverty reduction through economic growth.’ Using land as a lens, I explore recent eras of development assistance and ask if the Millennium-era has been appreciably different from pre-2000 development. The backdrop of my study is an MCC-sponsored land reform in Lesotho. I use data drawn from fieldwork in Lesotho to argue that the logics and outcomes of the Development industry’s land policies have remained largely the same.

In South Africa, policies of separate development and restrictions placed on capital expenditure imposed on the lands occupied by the indigenous people during the colonial era prevented the state from implementing the cadastre in the communal areas of the country. The status quo persists to this day, which has resulted in a dual system that promoted investment in areas where private property rights were permitted, but relegated the traditional communities into poverty and disinvestment

In October 2014, for the first time in recent history, the government of Myanmar decided to organize a public consultation to inform the development of a national policy. To support this consultation process, several organizations decided to organize civil society pre-consultation activities to listen and gather concerns from smallholder farmers to formulate relevant recommendations for the policy dialogue.

According to land reform experts, in Afghanistan, as in other developing countries, land administration is critical to economic growth and security. Since 2004, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) has supported efforts to address land reform and land tenure in Afghanistan because of their effects on the economy and the lives of the Afghan people. According to a U.S. Institute of Peace land expert, the majority of Afghans do not have proper legal documentation for their land ownership, due in part to poor paper records and land titles.

Following a chaotic political decolonization, from 1975 to 2000, the Comoros failed to sustain the extension of private land ownership pursued since the beginning of the twentieth century and to implement land reform prepared with the assistance of the FAO and the UNDP but abandoned after the assassination of the President of the Republic in 1989. This reform was based on a form of heritage management recognizing the plural and complementary nature of modes of securing land tenure.