While women’s rights to land and property are protected under the Kenyan Constitution of 2010 and in various national statutes, in practice, women remain disadvantaged and discriminated. The main source of restriction is customary laws and practices, which continue to prohibit women from owning or inheriting land and other forms of property.
The first set of the land laws were enacted in 2012 in line with the timelines outlined in the Constitution of Kenya 2010. In keeping with the spirit of the constitution, the Land Act, Land Registration Act and the national Land Commission Act respond to the requirements of Articles 60, 61, 62, 67 & 68 of the Constitution. The National Land Policy, which was passed as Sessional Paper No. 3 of 2009, arrived earlier than the Constitution, with some radical proposals on the land Management.
In Kenya, insecure land tenure and inequitable access to land, forest and water resources have contributed to conflict and violence, which has in turn exacerbated food insecurity. To address these interlinked problems, a new set of laws and policies on food security and land governance are currently being introduced or designed by the Government of Kenya. The new Food Security Bill explicitly recognizes the link between food security and land access, and the 2012 land laws target the corrupt system of land administration that made much of Kenya’s land grabbing possible.
The Lao Land and Forest Allocation Policy (LFAP) was intended to provide clearer property rights for swidden farmers living in mountainous areas. These lands are legally defined as “State” forests but are under various forms of customary tenure. The policy involves demarcating village territorial boundaries, ecological zoning of lands within village territories, and finally allocating a limited number of individual land parcels to specific households for farming.
While early attempts at land titling in Africa were often unsuccessful, the need to secure land rights has kindled renewed interest, in view of increased demand for land, a range of individual and communal rights available under new laws, and reduced costs from combining information technology with participatory methods. We used a difference-in-difference approach to assess the effects of a low-cost land registration program in Ethiopia, which covered some 20 million plots over five years, on investment.
This event, hosted at ODI in London, was convened to discuss the use of new technologies to map and document land rights, and their impact on land registration and administration, and pr
Land is the most fundamental resource in any society because it is the basis of human survival. Land is the space upon which all human activities take place and provides continued existence of all life forms and minerals.
Zambia remains committed to the socio-economic development planning of the country as reflected by the return to development planning in 2005. The Seventh National Development Plan (7NDP) for the period 2017- 2021 is the successor to the Revised Sixth National Development Plan, 2013-2016 (R-SNDP) following its expiry in December 2016. The Plan, like the three national development plans (NDPs) that preceded it, is aimed at attaining the long-term objectives as outlined in the Vision 2030 of becoming a “prosperous middle-income country by 2030”.
Zambia’s agriculture sector provides the main support for the rural economy. This assertion is based on the fact that about forty nine percent of the Zambian population depends on agriculture, primarily through smallholder production for their livelihoods and employment (CSO, 2014). Notwithstanding this fact, in 2015 the sector contributed 8.5 percent to the GDP and approximately 9.6 percent of national export earnings (CSO, 2015; World Bank, 2016). The potential for agricultural growth in Zambia is staggering.
Twenty years after the end of apartheid farm dwellers remain some of the most vulnerable people in South Africa, with many still facing extreme tenure insecurity and lacking access to adequate housing and basic services.2 The approximately three million black South Africans (6% of the population) who live on privately owned farms in formerly white commercial farming areas are among the poorest South Africans,3 whose vulnerability is exacerbated by their “socio-economic marginality and geographical isolation”.4
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