Guest commentary by Anna Knox, Chief of Party, USAID's LAND project in Rwanda.

By Frank Pichel, Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist, USAID.
I was pleased to attend the June 2014 intersessional meeting of the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme (KPCS) in Shanghai, China and want to share several noteworthy achievements for USAID’s ongoing efforts to strengthen land tenure and property rights and prevent conflict.

Report presents grassroots women’s approaches to access justice with a focus on land and property rights in Africa. This community empowerment-based research undertaken by the Huairou Commission and its partner groups across 7 African countries – Cameroon, Ghana, Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe – showcases women’s rights challenges and effective strategies to improve women’s access to justice. These groups are making an impact through strategies such as community mapping exercises, local-to-local dialogues, and developing community watchdogs and training community paralegals.

Income differences arise from many
sources. While some kinds of inequality, caused by effort
differences, might be associated with faster economic
growth, other kinds, arising from unequal opportunities for
investment, might be detrimental to economic progress. This
study uses two new metadata sets, consisting of 118
household surveys and 134 Demographic and Health Surveys, to
revisit the question of whether inequality is associated

Guest commentary by Kent Elbow, Independent Land Tenure and Property Rights Specialist.

The kinetic energy in wind is converted into mechanical power in specialized propeller-driven turbines mounted on towers. A generator inside the turbine converts the mechanical power into electricity. Utility-scale wind turbines range in size from 100 kilowatts to as large as several megawatts. Turbines can be built on land or offshore and are grouped into 'wind farms' that provide bulk power to the electrical grid. Smaller turbines are used for homes, telecommunications dishes, and water pumping, sometimes in connection with diesel generators, batteries, and photovoltaic systems.

Guest Commentary by Provash Budden, Mercy Corps' Colombia Country Director.

Repasa la legislación agraria desde la reforma de 1953, pasando por la constitución del 2009 y la legislación boliviana hasta septiembre del 2013.

Two tradeoffs have been widely seen to
severely constrain the scope for attacking poverty using
redistributive transfers in poor countries: an
equity-efficiency tradeoff and an insurance-efficiency
tradeoff. The author provides a critical overview of recent
theoretical and empirical work that has called into question
the extent of these tradeoffs in poor countries. He argues
that these aggregate tradeoffs are often exaggerated.

On May 19, the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) began multi-stakeholder negotiations intended to finalize the Principles for Responsible Agricultural Investment (RAI)—a set of critical principles that can help guide national regulations, global corporate social responsibility initiatives, and individual contracts covering all types of investment in agriculture. The RAI principles were developed through a broad, inclusive multi-stakeholder process, involving governments, civil society and the private sector.

On April 29, 2014, the United Nations Security Council voted to lift a long-standing ban on diamond exports from Côte d’Ivoire. Ending the nine-year-old ban will encourage greater transparency in Côte d’Ivoire’s diamond sector and potentially move an estimated $12 to $23 million annually from the illicit diamond trade into the formal economy.

Rwanda has provided a picture of promising change for improving gender equalities in land rights. This report draws upon extensive qualitative field research in 20 sectors of Rwanda to examine the current state of gendered rights to land in practice. Among Rwandan communities, there is now widespread knowledge of laws granting gender-equal rights. More and more women are receiving inheritance and inter-vivos gifts and are increasingly receiving these in equal shares, while formally married women are exercising greater decision-making power over land held jointly with their husbands.