The Land Portal has been following the news about USAID’s shutdown with much sadness and concern. During its 60-plus years of existence, the agency has acted on many fronts of international development, funding and managing thousands of initiatives to ensure good health, education, food security, women’s empowerment and, not least, good land governance in many countries of the Global South.
With that experience, a lot of knowledge, good practices, and tools were developed. Since a few days ago, USAID’s main website has been down, closing access to this wealth of information to a global community. Several partners in the land sector are alarmed and have contacted us to join efforts in retrieving and backing up as many publications and other resources as possible.
While we cannot ingest all of USAID’s knowledge products, we can do our best to preserve its land knowledge. They include, for example, USAID’s Land Links country profiles, which inspired our own country portfolios. The Land Links website is still online, but we do not know for how long. Given our role as an open-access information portal, we are currently working to back up all the resources still accessible on the Land Links website and make them available on our site. We currently host more than 500 publications by USAID, including guidelines and reports produced in the scope of specific projects such as this one in Rwanda. We hope to have this number grow as soon as we finalize the retrieval and ingestion of more publications in our Land Library. We have also backed up the source code of USAID’s widely used Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST), currently still available through github.
Access to information is a fundamental right in democracies. It is also an enabler for sustainable development, promoting society's participation in decisions about our health, environment, economy, and lands. Let us keep USAID’s and other agencies’ knowledge open and accessible, and allow millions of people around the world to use it to secure their land rights.
Cover Photo: Nzamane Land Certificate Distribution, May 2022, USAID, Credit: Clement Chirwa (CC BY-SA 2.0).
