Terra Firma and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) are pleased to announce the launch of a new LAND-at-scale project: Scaling Community Land Rights Certification in Municipal Areas of Mozambique. The project started implementation this month (February 2024) in the rural hinterlands of four municipalities in Manica, Sofala and Zambezia provinces.

The second LAND-at-scale (LAS) exchange took place from June 26^th to June 28^th, 2023. Sixty partners came together in Utrecht, the Netherlands to exchange lessons learned and explore common challenges. As of 2023, ten country projects are currently being implemented under the LAS program, namely Burkina Faso, Burundi, Chad, Colombia, Mali, Mozambique, the Palestinian Territories, Somalia, Rwanda and Uganda. All countries were represented and almost all implementing partners were present at the Exchange.

Challenges with regards to scaling is not unique to the land sector. Working in the context of agriculture for development, CGIAR and Wageningen University developed the Scaling Readiness approach.  This approach response to the fact that the pressure to demonstrate fast and visible results and impact at scale, has sometimes resulted in unreasonable and unrealistic expectations, and in fact stimulated simplistic and non-sustainable scaling approaches.

Burundi has the world’s highest hunger score and around 45 percent of the population is affected by food insecurity. The country copes with increasing scarcity of land as a result of increasing population size, returnees and IDPs and climate change. With the majority of Burundians depending on agriculture for their food and livelihoods, land scarcity makes this reliance on agriculture precarious. This pressure on land causes elevated levels of land disputes with over 55% of all court cases being related to conflicts over land.

On 27-28 June 2022, RVO organized the first annual LAND-at-scale exchange, bringing together over fifty LAND-at-scale project partners, knowledge management partners, Committee members as well as representatives from the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs for an in-depth introduction of all LAND-at-scale stakeholders and facilitate a learning exchange.

The LAND-at-sale project in Colombia was the first LAND-at-scale project to kick off. With its mid-term review just concluded, the project provides interesting insights into the challenges of not only achieving tenure security but sustaining it over time within a complex context. LAND-at-scale interviewed Piet Spijkers at Kadaster International, to learn more about their approach to achieve and sustain tenure security in Colombia through the LAND-at-scale project.

There is an immense pressure on land in Uganda. The country has a rapidly growing population and is host to the world’s third largest refugee population. Particularly poor people struggle to get access to healthy food. Agriculture practices need to become more efficient and focused on the domestic market. The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (EKN) in Uganda works to improve food security in selected areas in the country. Among several food security projects, the EKN works with the LAND-at-scale program to improve land governance.

The main objective of the LAND-at-scale program is to directly strengthen essential land governance components for men, women and youth that have the potential to contribute to structural, just, sustainable and inclusive change at scale. An ambitious objective, that cannot be achieved in isolation. Alignment is, therefore, a key factor in all LAND-at-scale activities - be it at project level for our country interventions or through our collaborative approach to knowledge management.

Knowledge management and learning are at the heart of the LAND-at-scale program. On June 29^th at a pre-event of the LANDac conference, the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO), LANDac and the International Land Coalition (ILC) officially announced their collaboration to implement the knowledge management (KM) component of the program.

Près de la moitié de la population mondiale vit dans les zones rurales des pays à revenu faible ou intermédiaire. La sécurité foncière – à savoir le droit d’accéder aux terres et aux ressources naturelles, comme les forêts, les zones de pâturage communal, les zones de pêche et d’autres ressources collectives, et de les exploiter – joue donc un rôle fondamental dans le développement durable.

تُعرَّف تنمية القدرات بأنها "العملية التي يحصل من خلالها الأفراد والمنظمات والمجتمعات على القدرات و العمل على  تقويتها والحفاظ عليها لوضع أهداف التنمية الخاصة بهم وتحقيقها بمرور الوقت" منظمة التعاون الاقتصادي والتنمية (2006).

تعد تنمية القدرات أمرًا مهمًا للغاية في المنطقة العربية لنضمن أن إدارة الأراضي و مواردها  تتماشى مع تحديات العصر الحالي،