Based on government statistics and interviews with villagers across Malawi this article argues that customary matrilineal and patrilineal land tenure systems serve to weaken security of land tenure for some family members as well as obstructing the creation of gender-neutral inheritance of lands. Data from the National Census of Agriculture and Livestock 2007and the 2008 Population and Housing Census are used to characterize marriage systems and landholding patterns of local communities. Marriage systems correspond to customary land-tenure patterns of matrilineal or patrilineal cultures.

In Liberia it is estimated that around half the country’s land mass has been promised to foreign companies and investors. From 2009-11 the Sustainable Development Institute and NAMATI embarked on an action research project to support rural communities to protect, document, and manage their customary lands and natural resources. Drawing from lessons learned in the field, they sought to bring the voices and realities from rural Liberia to influential policymakers.

For a long time sub-Saharan Africa has been considered to have abundant and underutilized land than any other continent. On the contrary, recent studies show that many rural Africans live in increasingly densely populated areas where all arable land is allocated or under cultivation. This has led to a long-term decline in farm size and reduced fallows.

The global extreme poverty rate has
fallen by half since 1990, but progress within the
developing world has been uneven. Extreme poverty remains
widespread in most low-income countries while many
middle-income countries also continue to have substantial
levels with many people there who have escaped extreme
poverty remaining poor and vulnerable. Nor has there been
robust progress in sharing prosperity: in many developing

The Voluntary Guidelines on Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security (VGGT), was developed under the Committee on World Food Security as a result of collaboration among different groups of stakeholders – governments, civil society, private sector, academia. The VGGT is intended to provide a framework for responsible tenure governance that supports food security, poverty alleviation, sustainable resource use and environmental protection.

This discussion paper on the “VGGT and National Policies on the Governance of Tenure”3

 has

been commissioned by the Asian NGO Coalition (ANGOC) as a member of the Philippine

Development Forum – Working Group on Sustainable Rural Development (PDF-SRD).4 This

paper examines national policies as embodied in the 1987 Philippine Constitution and the

major land and natural resource laws passed by the Philippine legislature. This research is

Climate change presents significant
threats to sustainable poverty reduction in Tajikistan. The
primary impacts on rural livelihoods are expected to stem
from reduced water quantity and quality (affecting
agriculture), and increased frequency and severity of
disasters. Options for farming households to autonomously
adapt (and thereby move from climate vulnerability to
resilience) include adoption of on-farm and off-farm

Real gross domestic product (GDP)
expanded by 6.7 percent in 2013, a modest deceleration from
the 7 percent recorded in the previous year, but well above
the average 4.9 percent rate of growth recorded over the
last ten years. The economy benefited from strong growth in
the agriculture (rebounding from last year's drought),
mining and services sectors, which largely offset weaker
activity in fishing activity. A continuation of these

This case study is one of six
evaluations of the implementation of the World Bank's
1991 Forest Strategy. This and the other cases (Cameroon,
China, Costa Rica, India, and Indonesia) complement a review
of the entire set of lending and nonlending activities of
the World Bank Group and the Global Environment Facility.
The World Bank has clearly diminished its lending presence
in the Amazon in the past decade. It has moved from the

Since the 1980s and early 1990s, the
World Bank has been supporting projects that involve
communities own development. This has been largely
manifested in the design and implementation of
community-based development (CBD) and community-driven
development (CDD) initiatives, with the latter gaining
increasing momentum in recent years. The purpose of this
study was to assess the development effectiveness of the

The International Monetary Fund (IMF)
and the World Bank introduced the Poverty Reduction Strategy
Paper (PRSP) process in 1999 to strengthen the poverty
alleviation focus of their assistance to low-income
countries. This report reviews Tajikistan s experience with
the PRSP process, focusing on the effectiveness of IMF and
World Bank support to the process and the extent to which
the two institutions lending and non-lending activities in

Using household survey data for 1998, the authors assess the distributional impact of the recent economic crisis in the Philippines. The results suggest that the impact of the crisis was modest, leading to a five percent reduction in average living standards, and a nine percent increase in the incidence of poverty - with larger increases indicated for the depth, and severity of poverty. The greater shock came from El Nino, rather than through the labor market. The labor market shock was progressive (reducing inequality) while El Nino shock was regressive (increasing inequality).