Empowering Ethnic Communities to Defend their Land Rights and Promote Conservation

General

Land is life to the ethnic community people of Bangladesh. They are dependent on land for their life, livelihood, culture, religion, food and water. The land and forest is like their mother. For many reasons the indigenous people are losing their land including through forceful occupation by the powerful people or businesses or by the Forest Department. In other cases poverty is leading people to mortgage their land or they are being evicted due to government policies which favour the powerful. This project will work in Greater Mymensingh region where there are 8 different Ethnic community peoples who have been struggling for land rights for many years. Caritas Bangladesh and BELA will work together to strengthen the capacity of ethnic community people to establish their rights over their land and other rights while promoting bio-diversity conservation and development. Caritas Bangladesh will lead the project on the ground and mobilize the community and CBOs of the ethnic community peoples for awareness raising and capacity building through different meeting, seminar, workshop, training etc. BELA will provide a technical and professional legal support for the Indigenous People and CBOs to initiate advocacy interventions with the policy makers at National and International level on land and other rights as well as ecology and conservation issues. For example demanding a separate Land Commission for the Indigenous People of the Plain land.