This paper first presents a clustering of women based on the characterization of their distinct access rights to néré. Secondly, the types of access rights are characterized also in spatial terms, based on the type of land use where the women harvesting is exercised.

Parkia biglobosa, a NTFP tree species commonly known as "néré" is particularly important in the diet of rural and urban populations in the Sudano-Sahelian zone. The seeds are processed into a highly nutritious sauce, called "soumbala", combined with cereal dishes. While néré is very popular, its occurrence is declining because of various threats hindering its regeneration. In a condition of increasing scarcity of néré and increasing demand, changes in use and access rights, depending on the social status of harvesters, are taking place. Harvesting is an activity carried out by women.

This working paper was commissioned by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), in order to explore how land tenure systems in different ecosystems and bio-cultural regions around the world are linked to land degradation or sustainable land management. It is against this backdrop that five major issues surrounding land tenure, and rights for improved land management and sustainable development, are addressed; these are:

• Problems associated with land ownership (titling, tenure and customary rights);

Property rights economically empower women by creating opportunities for earning income, securing their place in the community and ensuring their livelihoods. When women are economically empowered, it spurs development for their families and communities. Property Rights and Gender in Uganda: A Training Toolkit seeks to strengthen understanding of property rights for women and men as equal citizens.

Recognition of the potentially deleterious implications of inequality in opportunity originating in a skewed asset distribution has spawned considerable interest in land reforms. However, little attention has been devoted to fact that, in the longer term, the measures used to implement land reforms could negatively affect productivity. Use of state level data on rental restrictions, together with a nationally representative survey from India, suggests that, contrary to original intentions, rental restrictions negatively affect productivity and equity.

Recognition of the importance of institutions that provide security of property rights and relatively equal access to economic resources to a broad cross-section of society has renewed interest in the potential of asset redistribution, including land reforms. Empirical analysis of the impact of such policies is, however, scant and often contradictory. This paper uses panel household data from India, together with state-level variation in the implementation of land reform, to address some of the deficiencies of earlier studies.

Although a large theoretical literature discusses the possible inefficiency of sharecropping contracts, the empirical evidence on this phenomenon has been ambiguous at best. Household-level fixed-effect estimates from about 8,500 plots operated by households that own and sharecrop land in the Ethiopian highlands provide support for the hypothesis of Marshallian inefficiency. At the same time, a factor adjustment model suggests that the extent to which rental markets allow households to attain their desired operational holding size is extremely limited.

Although economic reform has brought remarkable progress in poverty reduction in Vietnam, the scale and depth of ethnic minority poverty in Vietnam presents one of the major challenges to achieving the targets for poverty reduction set out in the Socio-Economic Development Plan, as well as the millennium development goals. The authors first review a series of monetary and non-monetary indicators which show the living standards of the ethnic minorities are improving but still lag seriously behind those of the majority Kinh-Hoa.

This review of public expenditures on Social Protection (SP) in Nicaragua is based on the analytical framework of Social Risk Management (SRM) developed by the World Bank. The concept of managing social risk comes from the notion that certain groups in society are vulnerable to unexpected shocks which threaten their livelihood and/or survival. Social protection focuses on the poor since they are more vulnerable to the risks and normally do not have the instruments to handle these risks.

The Country Environmental Analysis (CEA) for Timor-Leste identifies environmental priorities through a systematic review of environmental issues in natural resources management and environmental health in the context of the country's economic development and environmental institutions. Lack of data has been the main limitation in presenting a more rigorous analysis. Nevertheless, the report builds on the best available secondary data, presents new data on the country's wealth composition, and derives new results on the costs of water and air pollution.