Chhatarpur (India) – As the monsoon storms bear down on India, a dedicated group of women hope that after years of backbreaking labour, water shortages will no longer leave their village high and dry.

Rome - The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) today welcomed a groundbreaking $65 million contribution from the Asian Development Bank (ADB) to boost food security and support livelihoods of the most vulnerable rural communities in Afghanistan.

The Netherlands Agency for Enterprise and Development (RVO) is pleased to announce its collaboration with the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands (EKN) in Bamako, SNV, the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), the University of Legal and Political Sciences of Bamako and the National Coordination of Peasant Organizations for implementation of a LAND-at-scale project in Mali "Strengthening local capacities to manage land conflicts and protect customary rights". The intervention will run until 2023 and has a budget of €1.3 million.

Whichever way one looks at it, land is one of the most prized natural assets in the world – Tanzania not excepted, we stress here. This is especially the case for crop farmers, nomadic pastoralists and investors in income-generating-cum-profit-making businesses.

Also, boundary conflicts between neighbouring land owners are not unknown.

Around May this year, there was a video that went viral on social media and reintroduced the conversation on how agriculture could be made more “attractive” to the youth in Africa.

The video was from the 2018 Youth Employment in Agriculture conference in Kigali, Rwanda. In the video, a young woman presented a number of factors that governments, donors and other non-State actors should consider when promoting agriculture among the youth.

CARATA, Peru, July 5 (Reuters) - Maxima Ccalla, 60, an indigenous Quechua woman, has spent her life tilling the harsh soil in Peru's Andean highlands, resigned to a fate far removed from the vast riches buried deep beneath her feet in seams of copper, zinc and gold.

The Andean communities in Ccalla's home region of Puno and beyond have long clashed with the mining companies that dig mineral wealth out from the ground.

A number of heavily entrenched cultural practices and policy orientation continue to frustrate efforts and gender equity in our country.

At the economic level, requirements for example for loans are pegged on collaterals such as land title deeds, yet traditionally women rarely inherited land thus fund almost impossible to get loans from financial institutions.

He had heard from around the town that there was an elderly but vibrant woman selling a piece of her land in Nkozi, close to Uganda Martyrs University.

At the time, Nkozi did not have the status and population it does now. In 2003, a young Vincent Agaba acquired the land.

“A quarter of an acre at Shs3m,” he says.  Agaba was neither employed nor earning from any other source. It was from his pocket money that he saved money to acquire the sizeable land.

Reports of a shortage of land for agriculture in some rural areas are surprising, to say the least. A few years ago it was reported that hundreds of youth in Arumeru District, Arusha Region, were relocating to Kenya because of a lack of farmland in the area.

This state of affairs is surprising because it is quite unusual for rural residents to complain about a shortage of farmland in their areas, where agriculture is supposed to be the mainstay of the local economy.

In a bid to expedite the distribution of land ownership certificates to the landless people and decentralise the federal responsibility, the government has formed committees of the Landless Squatters' Problems Resolution Commission in all the 77 districts of the country. Each of the seven-member committees will include a chairperson and two others appointed by the government, with the remaining members representing the district Land Revenue Office, Survey and Forest Offices and the District Coordination Committee.