Those who led southern African states to independence promised to redress the inequalities of settler colonialism by returning the land to the people. A generation later the rural poor are still waiting. Many lack access and full rights to agricultural land and, as developments in Zimbabwe and South Africa show, they are getting angry. Where did post-independence land reform policy go wrong?

After four decades of agricultural-led development strategies in the postindependent Malawi, economic growth has been erratic and a large proportion of the population live below the poverty line and studies suggests that the poverty situation has worsened. Agricultural policies favoured large-scale (estate) production at the expense of smallholder farmers who account for more than 80 percent of households.

Focusing on water resources and irrigation, this paper documents a talk by Michael Lipton exploring approaches to poverty alleviation in developing Asia. The talk discusses the findings of a recent paper ‘Pro-poor intervention strategies in irrigated agriculture in Asia: poverty in irrigated agriculture - realities, issues, and options with guidelines’. It looks at a number of topical issues such as irrigation in relation to access and global poverty, irrigation corruption, and sustainability.

This brief paper argues that through co-ownership, co-operatives offer a significant pathway for poor beneficiaries to secure land, wealth and financial resources - with benefits being augmented through sound institutions, human capital development and grant support.

Examines—from the perspective of transaction costs—factors that constrain access to land for the rural poor and other socially excluded groups in India. They find that: Land reform has reduced large landholdings since the 1950s. Medium-size farms have gained most. Formidable obstacles still prevent the poor from gaining access to land. The complexity of land revenue administration in Orissa is partly the legacy of distinctly different systems, which produced more or less complete and accurate land records.

This study investigates the relationship between rural poverty, property rights, and environmental resource management in a semi-arid region of Kenya using analysis of survey data. It argues that reduced environmental degradation will increase agricultural productivity, and which will then translate into lower levels of poverty as incomes and consumption expenditures rise.

Access to land is deeply important in rural India, where the incidence of poverty is highly correlated with lack of access to land. Mearns provides a framework for assessing alternative approaches to improving access to land by India's rural poor.

The paper offers proposals for integrating understanding of and response to the pandemic into land reform-related development activities.

Sets out to examine the question of aid provision. As part of a general study on Finnish aid, the main focus is on two projects in Zanzibar: Zanzibar Forestry Project (ZFP) and Zanzibar Integrated Lands and Environment Management (ZILEM) project. This study centres on initial research carried out in Dar es Salaam (documentary) and Unguja (documentary, observational and in-depth interviews). [author]

This case study draws on research that examines

Redistributive land reform in Namibia is widely regarded as a precondition for sustainable rural development and poverty alleviation. This paper briefly discusses the development of thinking on land reform and the development of land reform models prior to Independence.

Informal systems for land delivery, which have in many cases evolved from earlier customary practices, still account for over half the land supplied for housing in African cities and are a particularly important channel for the poor. This study examines how informal systems of housing land delivery operate in six African cities discussing how they are evolving and how they interact with formal land administration systems.