Building a world where people, in particular women, and responsible businesses have secure land tenure rights to invest, thrive and contribute to inclusive and sustainable economic development.
LEGEND aims to improve the quality and impact of land investments so they contribute sustainably to growth while safeguarding rights and opportunities for poor people, rural and urban, and especially women. It has done this through: building policy coherence globally using internationally agreed principles and guidelines, such as the VGGT and CFS RAI principles; promoting application of emerging good practice emerging across countries; and stimulating the development of innovative tools and partnerships involving civil society, private sector and governments at global, country and local levels.
LEGEND’s CLST has focused on four main objectives:
- Generating, collating and disseminating better data and knowledge on good land governance, responsible land investment and secure land rights, and promoting their use in programme design and policy debate by governments, private sector, civil society and international agencies. LEGEND analysis on legal empowerment, legacy issues, inclusive agri-business, gender issues and the broad landscape of responsible land investment has reached over 46,000 users.
- Facilitating the scoping, design and review of DFID country programmes in 11 countries – Afghanistan, Ethiopia, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, Indonesia, Malawi, Mozambique, Myanmar, St. Helena, Senegal, Sierra Leone and Zambia.
- Establishing a Challenge Fund to support the development and testing of innovative approaches and partnerships for strengthening land governance in agricultural investments, and land and natural resource-based value chains. Seven projects were implemented in seven five African countries: Malawi, Mozambique, Tanzania, Zambia and Sierra Leone.
- Supporting a network of global civil society partners to improve information & and knowledge through research, new diagnostic tools, better data and performance assessments, government capacity building, clear and practical tools to help all stakeholders deliver better on land. Through LEGEND grant support, partners have established new platforms to share and deliver land knowledge and data amongst stakeholders, deepen understanding of tenure risk in land investments, and helped to protect land rights and strengthen land governance processes across the globe.
About us
Land: Enhancing Governance for Economic Development (LEGEND) is a £38mn DFID global programme running from May 2015 to March 2021. LEGEND was designed to mobilise knowledge and capacity for design and delivery of new land-related programmes, improve land governance as an essential and inclusive basis for economic development, and strengthen land and property rights at scale.
LEGEND Core Land Support Team
Over five years from 2015 to 2019, the LEGEND Core Land Support Team (CLST) has supported LEGEND deliver the above objectives, including through:
- A Knowledge Management Consortium with leading land expertise from an alliance of research institutes - Overseas Development Institute (ODI); International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED); and Natural Resources Institute (NRI).
- Overall programme and finance management by KPMG, including management of the Challenge Fund, for which NRI provided technical and learning support.