On December 11th, CNN’s Fareed Zakaria featured an article on strengthening women’s land rights in Kenya. The article appears in the CNN Global Public Square blog and was written by Tim Hanstad, President of Landesa, a Seattle-based NGO and partner in several USAID Land Tenure projects. The article highlights USAID’s Kenya JUSTICE project, which works with local customary justice systems to improve women’s land rights.
A recent New York Times article features a conversation with Roy Prosterman, founder of Landesa, a Seattle, Washington-based NGO and partner in USAID Land Tenure projects in Kenya, Liberia and other locations. Prosterman founded Landesa, formerly the Rural Development Institute, in 1966 and has been nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize. To date, Landesa has worked with local governments in over 50 countries to develop laws, policies and programs that provide secure land rights for the world’s poorest people.
The NGO Namati, along with partner IDLO, has just issued a new report entitled “Protecting Community Lands and Resources.” Over the past decade there has been a strong shift in land tenure work away from projects that provide for individualized titling of lands and towards the recognition of customary tenure systems and the formalization of rights held by communities. Countries adopt various approaches to formalization but often pass laws that are, on their face, designed to help protect communities against illegal or coercive dispossession and loss of rights by documenting rights.
On June 20th, the One Campaign posted this blog about USAID’s Kenya Justice Project. The TrustLaw blog of Thompson Reuters also picked up the story.
Last week, USAID's May/June 2012 Issue of FrontLines, was released; it features stories on Child Survival and Ethiopia. One of the Ethiopia articles profiles a Land Tenure and Property Rights project. Karol Boudreaux shares project challenges and successes in, "A Powerful Piece of Paper".
According to a recent article from the IPS News Agency, women in Cameroon produce 80% of the country’s food needs yet own only 2% of the land. Though a 1974 Land Tenure Ordinance provides women with equal rights to property ownership, in reality customary tenure practices which discriminate against women sometimes trump national laws. In some cases, customary systems have provided women with secure rights to use land and resources however, recently women have experience greater difficulties protecting rights under these systems.
This study strongly indicates the lack
of access to land for women in Kenya's agricultural
communities cannot be framed as a failing of formal or
informal systems, but rather as issues with both. Even the
creation of fused or hybrid mechanisms, such as the Land
Control Boards (LCBs) and Land Disputes Tribunals (LDTs),
has not increased access to justice. Underlying power
dynamics and the use of such systems by self-serving
This is the second part of land studies
on Northern Uganda designed to inform the Peace, Recovery
and Development Plan (PRDP). This second part of the study,
undertaken during the second half of 2007 in the Lango and
Acholi regions, builds on the first phase conducted in 2006
in the Teso region. This second study has been designed to
present a more quantitative analysis of trends on disputes
and claims on land before displacement, during displacement
Although increased global demand for
land has led to renewed interest in African land tenure, few
models to address these issues quickly and at the required
scale have been identified or evaluated. The case of
Rwanda's nation-wide and relatively low-cost land
tenure regularization program is thus of great interest.
This paper evaluates the short-term impact (some 2.5 years
after completion) of the pilots undertaken to fine-tune the
Although early attempts at land titling
in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure rights
in view of increased demand for land, options for
registration of a continuum of individual or communal rights
under new laws, and the scope for reducing costs by
combining information technology with participatory methods
have led to renewed interest. This paper uses a
difference-in-difference approach to assess economic impacts
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