India Land and Development Conference, ILDC is back with its eighth episode at the picturesque FLAME University in Pune this week. It has been quite a journey for this collaborative convening. Despite its 8th edition, it has emerged as a globally recognized land convergence event, drawing attention from far and near. 

Just thinking of a conference on a topic like ‘Land’, in a country like India, is in itself a big challenge, forget organizing it year after year, for eight years - setting a stature that has grown every year!  

In my role as Chair of the Board of the Land Portal Foundation, I recently had the opportunity to take part in two trainings to help me develop my leadership skills. The first was a 2-day Feminist Leadership ReTreat in Mechelen, Belgium, which I took part in alongside our Managing Director, Laura Meggiolaro, our Board Secretary, Laura Cunial, and seven other women leaders from different civil society organisations in Europe.

From the Land Portal team and board of directors

In 2022, countries reached a historic agreement to halt biodiversity loss by conserving at least 30% of land and water by 2030. This marked a critical step toward protecting the world's precious remaining species and ecosystems. But that's not all: The Global Biodiversity Framework, as it's known, also explicitly calls on countries to recognize and uphold Indigenous Peoples and local communities' rights in their conservation strategies.

India has made significant strides in empowering women over the past few decades, starting with self-help groups (SHGs) that became powerful vehicles for social inclusion. Government and NGO efforts later expanded to skilling and livelihood initiatives, helping women increase their income and build small businesses within their communities. Yet, despite this progress, the urgent need remains for a long-term, sustainable solution to women's empowerment.

Reliable tamper-proof records with a real time link between Registration, Survey and Revenue departments with common shared textual and spatial data that are geo-referenced and ground-truthed so that there is no need for repeated universal ground survey.

Such records are available to the respective land-holders/ owners with a simple system to update whenever a transfer takes place through sale, inheritance or any other transfer.

At the Rome launch of the Global Comparative Report on Security of Property Rights for Land and Housing in 2024 presented by Prindex initiative on October 22, alarming new data revealed that 1.1 billion people worldwide feel insecure about their property rights, reflecting an escalating global crisis in housing and land tenure. The findings, derived from Prindex data, present a worrying increase from 19% of the adult population in the surveyed 108 countries in 2020 to 23% in 2024—meaning almost one in four adults now fear losing their homes or land.

Photo: Youth in Rwanda engage in a Q & A session (Creative Commons Attribution)

Photo: UN Women (Creative Commons Attribution)

Photo Credit: ©2011CIAT/NeilPalmer

In the villages surrounding SudCam's vast rubber plantation in Southern Cameroon, the contrast between initial promises and current reality is striking. More than a decade after the establishment of this Halcyon Agri Corporation Limited subsidiary, local communities face a radical transformation of their environment and way of life.

Promising Beginnings, Rapid Disillusionment

The webinar Inclusive Land Governance and Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration: Whose Purpose?, which took place on 19 September, 2024, explored how a people-centered and holistic approach can transform Fit-for-Purpose Land Administration (FFPLA) and ensure that land administration truly serves the needs of communities.  The webinar, which was moderated by Imke Greven of the LAND-at-Scale Program Advisor at the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) gathered over 275 people.