This publication provides institutional investors with practical guidance on how to prevent, mitigate, and address negative impacts on human rights defenders in investment portfolios.

This note is part of an Action Notes series and provides guidance to governments on how to screen and select prospective investment projects to ensure they maximize the social, economic, and environmental benefits while minimizing the risks. It provides investors information on what can be expected in cases of good screening practice.

This note is part of an Action Notes series and provides examples of tools that government agencies can adapt to their national context and use to develop the technical capacity to screen and select investors.

Ethiopia has implemented one of the largest, fastest and cheapest land registration and certification reforms in Africa. While there have been evidences of positive impacts of this land reform in terms of increased investment, land productivity and land rental market activities, the government is now piloting another round of land registration and certification that involves GPS measurement and computer registration.

The webinar Rolling back social and environmental safeguards in the name of COVID-19, organized by Forest Peoples Programme, the Tenure Facility,  Middlesex University, the Lowenstein International Human Rights Clinic and the Land Portal Foundation, took place on Thursday, February 18, 2021.

Global leaders increasingly recognize that land rights for indigenous and local communities are a prerequisite for achieving national and international goals for forest governance, food security, climate mitigation, economic development and human rights.

Opening up land-related administrative data, combining it with data from other sources  and processing and making this data available as easily accessible information for women and men equally could be a means to counteracting land corruption in land management, land administration and land allocation. But does open data and enhanced data transparency indeed help to counteract land corruption?

Despite formal legal recognition of women’s land rights, no government institution is mandated to protect women’s land rights or to ensure their legal implementation and enforcement. The roles of decentralized land administration institutions do not include the protection of women’s land rights. More importantly, District Land Boards only control the allocation of public land and not private or customary. Several land dispute resolution institutions co-exist without clear coordination mechanisms.

This paper studies the impact of land tenure on household agricultural productivity in Benin. Compared to households without land ownership or right to land (squatters), results show that land certificate ownership increases by 0.238 the likelihood of investing in agricultural equipment, whereas customary law ownership increases this likelihood by 0.374. The study suggests that public authorities recognise customary rights and reinforce legal land institutions.

The movement to secure women’s land rights in Senegal needs to take into account the rights of all sections of the targeted communities. Hence, the cases presented testify to specific situations along with evaluations of initiatives targeting improvement of women’s land rights. For instance, much of the quota land allocated by the Delta Development and Operations Corporation (SAED) is either untapped, sold, or exploited by male members of the beneficiary women’s families.

The paper examines the pace of land acquisitions in terms of creating legislative and policy options to safeguard local communities that are directly affected, including compensation for land that is taken, and protecting community interests in the socio-economic and environmental continuum of investment projects, from design to implementation. The absence or weakness of formal landholding and land registration systems was evident in most research sites in Isiolo and Lamu.

The Cambodian government redistributed 1.2 million hectares, some revoked from economic land concessions (ELC), to more than 710,000 smallholders as private ownerships (2013-2014). The paper outlines key steps for granting new land concessions and improving the efficiency of existing ELCs (or similar large-scale state land licences). Cambodia’s excessive large-scale state land concessions have adversely affected the livelihoods and land tenure rights of local people, threatening the country’s rich biodiversity and restricting access to land especially for new farmer households.

A new Model Land Use Bill is proposed to address the lapses identified in the Nigerian Land Use Act (LUA, 1978), such as poor administrative system for lands, ownership, and the absence of community participation. This policy brief promotes a new land management structure for ease of business, to improve social and environmental protection, and to reduce land-grabbing by dispossession. The impact of land grabbing is one of many problems of social and environmental degradation, biodiversity loss and livelihoods impacted by deforestation.