The year 2016 marks 15 years since the new wave land reforms became operational in Tanzania. Despite its ambitious goals – encouraging land registration and titling, and empowering women and other vulnerable groups – the results are disillusioning. A brief overview of 15 years of implementation, using the Village Land Act as a case study.

Meant well doesn’t always mean done well. The Sustainable Development Goals are all set to undermine themselves, Stephan Klasen maintains. The worst aspect is that people, who really ought to be at the focus, threaten to fall by the wayside in this technocratic maze of hundreds of goals, targets, and indicators.

It would be difficult to imagine the diet of the local consumers around Lake Victoria without the silver cyprinid. The small fresh water sardine also plays an important role in women’s participation in Kenya’s fishery sector. However, in spite of intensive efforts, there is still a long way to go before they have achieved an equal role in the value chain.

During the last few years, the donor community has increased its efforts to reduce the large amounts of fish lost in the distribution chain in artisanal fishery, an endeavour that ought to be welcomed in principle. However, focusing on one single solution, the development of an expensive cool chain and the supply of fresh or frozen fish, represents a massive interference with the traditional processing and distribution channels, with women being the main losers. Our author calls for more foresight in international co-operation.

OVERVIEW: The Lao People’s Democratic Republic (Lao PDR) is a landlocked country situated in Southeast Asia, bordering Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, China and Myanmar. Despite a recent increase in the rate of urbanization and a relatively small amount of arable land per capita, most people in Lao PDR live in rural areas and work in an agriculture sector dominated by subsistence farming. Lao PDR’s economy relies heavily on its natural resources, with over half the country’s wealth produced by agricultural land, forests, water and hydropower and mineral resources.

OVERVIEW: Thailand is facing the challenges of a transition from lower- to upper-middle-income status. After decades of very rapid growth followed by more modest 5–6% growth after the Asian financial crisis of 1997–98, Thailand achieved a per capita GNI of US $3670 by 2008, reduced its poverty rate to less than 10% and greatly extended coverage of social services. Infant mortality has been cut to only 13 per 1000, and 98% of the population has access to clean water and sanitation.

Throughout the world, the vast majority of women are faced with conditions of access to land and control of land and natural resources that are unequal to those of men.

Social relations have trivialized the fact that they are entirely in charge of domestic work and the education of children, which prevents them from devoting themselves as much as men to agricultural activities. In the fields, they are the forced laborers of the family and take on the often less valued tasks, considered as part of their domestic obligations. As a result, they generally receive no income.

Partout dans le monde, l’immense majorité des femmes fait face à des conditions d’accès et de contrôle de la terre et des ressources naturelles inégales à celles des hommes.

Por todo el mundo, la inmensa mayoría de mujeres se enfrenta a condiciones desiguales de control y acceso a la tierra y a los recursos naturales respecto a los hombres.

La historia de Zenobia Romero López, mujer adulta mayor que sacó adelante a sus hijos con solo su trabajo en la tierra, en la comunidad de Uyuvirca,. Ella recibió los terrenos en herencia de su abuela materna pues creció a su lado, pero nunca tuvo el título de propiedad ni un reconocimiento oficial del Estado peruano, hasta el año 2009 que obtuvo un reconocimiento oficial.

Este es el caso de una propiedad familiar donde la necesidad del retorno a la tierra familiar impulsada por el peligro de pérdida del terreno ante la muerte del progenitor (propietario), y la mejora en las condiciones de vida que en este caso están expresadas en prácticas innovadoras, frente a los términos en los que el mercado convencional se desarrolla.

Las mujeres en la región de Ayacucho, Perú, especialmente afectadas por décadas de discriminación y violencia, incluida la violencia política, así como relegadas al trabajo doméstico, obtuvieron en este nuevo siglo el acceso a la tierra como propietarias individuales. Para lograrlo, las mujeres tuvieron que organizarse para demandar el derecho a poseer tierra ante su comunidad y ante el Estado.