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.

General

This project aims to increase land poor, women and small farmers' access to lands and promote sustainable use of such lands ultimately to improve livelihoods and food security of target groups. It plans to achieve this aim by enhancing knowledge, skills and capacity of community members on land rights and land reform; improving participation in and effectiveness of community land governance; ensuring and increase land poor, women and small farmers' access to land (particularly fallow public and private lands) and promote their sustainable use; developing and implementing land and agrarian reform plan at community level. Daily office management of the project will be done by the Kathmandu based Land Rights Program Officer with 50% field visit. The project will be supervised by Policy and Advocacy Coordinator. The direct management in field level will be done by implementation partner, Community Self Reliance Center (CSRC). They will have one project coordinator in national level and two district officers in each working districts. The two district officers will work closely with 12 community facilitators (6 in each district).

General

The Livestock project introduced the principle of holistic sustainable land management in Zambia, Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi. In 2021, the project expanded to two new sites in Zambia as a result of the high demand by the communities after noticing the positive results, reaching a total of 435 farmers supported.