Welcome to 2019. In San Francisco, commuters shuttle to work in self-driving Ubers. In Rwanda, drones deliver blood to patients. In China, Xiaomi released a $500 phone that allows users to map the world with 30 centimeter accuracy.

And yet, a quarter of the world’s population lacks a fundamental human right: the right to property.

Of late, land has increasingly been figuring into the development sector, for both positive and negative reasons.

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First and foremost, on behalf of the Land Portal team, I would like to thank those of you for taking the time out of your very busy schedules to complete our user survey. We are continuously trying to improve our services, and unlike many other websites, the Land Portal is a community in which dialogue and exchange of ideas are the cornerstone of what we do every day. Your feedback on our services is therefore crucial and invaluable to us!

The history of land rights in Colombia is a centuries-old tale of colonialism, highly concentrated land ownership and unsuccessful agrarian reforms. Fifty years of civil strife have left vast sections of the country’s land undocumented, vulnerable to land record manipulation and outright lawlessness.

By Tim Hanstad, Co-Founder & Senior Advisor, Landesa

This is the second blog in a series of two that are based on a keynote address made at the 2018 India Land Development Conference.

By Tim Hanstad, Co-Founder & Senior Advisor, Landesa

This is the first blog in a series of two that are based on a keynote address made at the 2018 India Land Development Conference.

I have been working on issues of land rights for more than 31 years in more than 22 countries, but no country has captured my attention, focus and heart more than India.  

Those of you who have visited Dubai in recent years may relate to what I am going to say: Dubai is in the middle of the desert, and its land, not that long ago, was really worth nothing. Now it is one of the most vibrant international cities in the world. All this happened in a relatively short time span.

The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) (link is external) spoke with Michael Jarvis, Executive Director of the Transparency and Accountability Initiative (TAI), about OpenLandContracts.org, how the landscape regarding contract transparency has changed in recent years, and what these changes mean for stakeholders seeking to improve governance and accountability in the context of natural resource investments.

By Andrew Smith

By Nghia Le Trung, Chairman of the Advisory Council, National Center for Research and Development of Open Technologies (RDOT), Ministry of Science and Technology of Vietnam

By Noel Taylor, Cadasta Foundation CEO

By Imma Subirats, Senior Knowledge and Information Management Officer at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

“We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect” (The Land Portal Video).