The illegal and irregular allocations of public land as chronicled in the Ndungu Report amount to a rip-off that dwarfs the Goldenberg and Anglo-Leasing scandals. Our analysis in this first issue in the series covers Karura, Ngong Road and Kiptagich forests and suggests a loss of public resources in excess of Ksh.18.4 billion. The Ndungu Report covers ten other forests as well as other public land, ranging from road reserves to cemeteries to public toilets and even State House land. As we cover these in future issues of the series, the cumulative loss will certainly be astounding.

Women’s rights to land remain a contested issue in Kenya despite the acceptance of the principle of equality of the genders in law. The 2010 Constitution of Kenya clearly provides for the principles of equality and non-discrimination at Article 27. Moreover, in the land policy principles and the national values and principles of governance, gender equality is included. Despite these clear provisions however, gender inequality in land relations persists. The patriarchal social ordering that privileges men in land holding has been a greater barrier to women’s land rights.

The KLA proposed constitutional principles on land reform as captured in the constitutional draft have become more pronounced with the approach of General Elections and the transition that is expected to see the departure of President Moi from leadership. We therefore, detest the frantic efforts to go to the forthcoming elections before adopting the Ghai draft constitution, because that will be endangering the aroused expectation that at long last we are on the road to sorting out land problems we have lived with since independence.

THEME: “Sustainable infrastructure, services and social protection for gender
equality and the empowerment of rural women and girls”

For a long time sub-Saharan Africa has been considered to have abundant and underutilized land than any other continent. On the contrary, recent studies show that many rural Africans live in increasingly densely populated areas where all arable land is allocated or under cultivation. This has led to a long-term decline in farm size and reduced fallows.

As the Government of Kenya treads the path to economic recovery, every Kenyan should be at home with the fact that many forms of economic development activities damage the natural resources upon which the economies are based. Nationally and internationally, a major environmental and development challenge is how to maintain the equilibrium between population, ecosystems and development.

The Government of Kenya through the Ministry of Lands and Housing (MOLH) has finally embarked on the process of developing a National Land Policy (NLP) that is envisaged to be in place by June 2005. It has been a tortuous journey for many in the civil society and other stakeholders. The NLP will come, as a gratifying culmination of a battle well fought and the win will hopefully be savoured for a very long time to come. The Minister of Lands and Housing, Hon.

This document sums up part of the presentations given during the first part of the LandVoc Community of Experts workshop, held on June 8th, 2020.  This workshop focused on the origins of LandVoc, how LandVoc is being used, future uses of LandVoc and the promotion of LandVoc uptake.  

Environmental activism, with decades of relevant presence already, is a fundamental element for the preservation of natural and cultural values. Theories around their bases, protagonists, methods, instruments and results proliferate in a period of obliged ecological transition. Here, we present an investigation in the region of Girona (Catalunya, Spain), with the main objective of reflecting on environmental activism and its singular impact on the territorial reality of this area.

This report provides a summary of a two-part online workshop in June 2020 to explore the creation of a community of experts to support the ongoing development of the LandVoc concept scheme, and to support ongoing contributions from the LandVoc community to AGROVOC. The workshops brought together 35 experts mprove awareness of the importance of controlled and multilingual vocabularies, and of value of semantics to management. of agriculture and land related knowledge.  

In recent history, Indonesian forest policies have been dominated by deforestation in the name of economic progress. Many actors have expressed concerns about this trend and have tried to reverse it in favour of a more sustainable pathway. From 2004–2017, non-governmental environmental organisations fought for the case of the coastal Tripa peat swamp rainforest in the province of Aceh, Sumatra. Unique in Indonesian history, they managed halting and reversing the deforestation of an area.

In the wake of the coronavirus crisis, governments across the world, including that ofKenya, have adopted a raft of far-reaching measures to curtail the spread of the virus.In Kenya, measures put in place include closure of learning institutions, mandatory selfquarantine for all who have entered the country in the recent past, pay cuts for a number of top civil servants, limited movement of prisoners and cessation of prison visits. The Judiciary and other government institutions have scaled down operations,among other actions.