

In the six months since the coronavirus began its global spread, more than 15 million people have been diagnosed with COVID-19 and more than 600,000 have perished, causing governments around the world to institute lockdowns and shut down businesses while entire industries have been devastated. This series of briefs, inspired by and sourced heavily from the Land Portal and Cadasta’s Leveraging Technology to Accelerate Land Administration During COVID-19 and Beyond webinar and discussion series as well as LANDac’s online hub on Land Governance and the COVID-19 Pandemic, spotlights a selection of these challenges, and provides suggestions for how they may be addressed.
Authors and Publishers
Chantal Wieckardt with contributing authors Dr. Gemma van der Haar and Dr. Guus van Westen
LANDac, the Netherlands Academie on Land Governance for Equitable and Sustainable Development, is a partnership between Dutch organizations working on land governance. The partners are the International Development Studies (IDS) group at Utrecht University (leading partner), African Studies Centre, Agriterra, the Sociology of Development and Change (SDC) group at Wageningen University, the Land Portal Foundation, HIVOS, the Royal Tropical Institute (KIT), the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and Enclude Solutions.
The vision of the Land Portal Foundation is to improve land governance to benefit those with the most insecure land rights and the greatest vulnerability to landlessness through information and knowledge sharing.
Since 1999, New America has nurtured a new generation of policy experts and public intellectuals. Today we are a community of innovative problem-solvers, combining our core expertise in researching, reporting and analysis with new areas of coding, data science, and human-centered design to experiment and innovate nationally and globally. We prize our intellectual and ideological independence and our diversity, seeking to do our best work and to reflect the America we are becoming.
Our Work
GLOBAL LEVEL COORDINATION
The Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) has been leading the Housing, Land and Property (HLP) Area of Responsibility (AoR) since 2016. Globally, the membership of the HLP AoR includes UN agencies, NGOs, research and academic institutions, donors, human rights and development agencies, and representatives of other AoRs and global clusters.
About Landesa
Landesa partners with governments and local organizations to ensure that the world’s poorest families have secure rights over the land they till. Founded as the Rural Development Institute, Landesa has helped more than 105 million poor families gain legal control over their land since 1967. When families have secure rights to land, they can invest in their land to sustainably increase their harvests and reap the benefits—improved nutrition, health, and education—for generations.