Following a chaotic political decolonization, from 1975 to 2000, the Comoros failed to sustain the extension of private land ownership pursued since the beginning of the twentieth century and to implement land reform prepared with the assistance of the FAO and the UNDP but abandoned after the assassination of the President of the Republic in 1989. This reform was based on a form of heritage management recognizing the plural and complementary nature of modes of securing land tenure.

Secure land tenure in rural landscapes is widely recognized as an essential foundation for achieving a range of economic development goals. However, forest areas in low and middle-income countries face particular challenges in strengthening the security of land and resource tenure. Forest peoples are often among the poorest and most politically marginalized communities in their national contexts, and their tenure systems are often based on customary, collective rights that have insufficient formal legal protection.

Nigeria presents a unique case study on differences in agricultural productivity between men and women. This study, which captures a comprehensive picture of agriculture across the nation, shows that female farmers produce 16 percent less per hectare than their male counterparts, when plot size, farmer characteristics, and inputs are taken into account. This gender gap is driven by the North East and Central zones located in the Northern region of the country, where female farmers are 28 percent less productive than male farmers.

With a fast growing population requiring an ever growing supply of food, a national poverty rate of 63 percent, and a labor force that is dominated by agricultural work, Nigeria's efforts to boost agricultural productivity could not be better timed. Though women constitute a large share of the agricultural labor force in Nigeria, little is known about their activities, roles, and constraints in the sector.

Although recent developments have increased interest in African land tenure, Rwanda's nation-wide Land Tenure Regularization (LTR) program is one of a few models to address these issues at the required scale.

Section one of this report opens with a brief environmental history of Haiti, followed by an analysis of the current state of environmental conditions, and closes with an examination of contemporary human and landscape vulnerabilities to acute and chronic environmental degradation and extreme climatic events. Section two of the report provides a brief summary of 15 regional or national landscape-level land management projects enacted in Haiti since the middle of the 20th century.

Many African countries rely on sporadic land transfers from customary to statutory domains to attract investment and improve agricultural performance. Data from 15,000 smallholders and 800 estates in Malawi allow exploring the long-term effects of such a strategy.

This paper looks at a variety of technical issues, challenges, and problems that arise during systematic first registration programs, their causes and what can be done to deal with them. Its aim is to provide practical advice to those who are designing or engaged in first registration programs that use the systematic adjudication approach and also those who supervise such programs so that the issues covered in this paper can be eliminated or their negative impact reduced.

Paul Wolfowitz, President of the World Bank, congratulated the editorial team of National Geographic for the special issue on Africa. National Geographic has played a unique role in broadening the knowledge of the world. The World Bank partnered with National Geographic to produce a full-color wall map to raise awareness of the millennium development goals (MDGs) and to highlight each country's progress. We often hear about an Africa that is ravaged by poverty, disease and conflict. There is another face to Africa, one of hope, ambition, energy, intelligence and achievement.

This report aims to extract lessons on slum upgrading and involuntary resettlement policies and practices learned from the process of addressing the Badia East case, which involved complex interactions between affected people, NGOs, the Bank and Lagos State Government.

While scholars long recognized the importance of land markets as a key driver of rural non-farm development and transformation in rural areas, evidence on the extent of their operation and the nature of participants remains limited. We use household data from 6 countries to show that there is great potential for such markets to increase productivity and equalize factor ratios. While rental markets transfer land to land-poor and labor-rich producers, their operation and thus impact may be constrained by policy restrictions.

This note aims to provide information and analysis as a basis for a better understanding of the challenges and constraints of achieving gender equality in Bolivia, with a special focus on the intersectionality between gender and ethnicity. Combining and analyzing existing evidence and new data, it seeks to document gender-specific disparities in development outcomes, highlight opportunities and constraints to women’s empowerment, and identify areas in which continuing knowledge gaps are particularly important to understand and address gender inequalities.