Indigenous peoples in the Peruvian Amazon have united and created the Wampis Nation – an autonomous territorial government – in order to defend their livelihood from the increasing pressure from extractive industries. Their autonomous government covers nearly an area the size of one-third of the Netherlands and more than 15,000 people are part of this one-of-a-kind initiative.
"Gender, Land and Mining in Pastoralist Tanzania" is the product of rigorous field research over two years by WOLTS team members from Mokoro and HakiMadini. Significant stresses from mining, population growth and climate change, as well as disturbing levels of violence against women have been uncovered in this study of two traditional pastoralist communities in Tanzania. Initial findings are based on repeat rounds of participatory fieldwork by the WOLTS team and have already received attention at national and local level.
CAPE TOWN (Reuters) - South Africa took a step on Tuesday to hasten the transfer of land from white to black owners when parliament backed a motion seeking to change the constitution to allow land expropriation without compensation.
The ruling African National Congress has long promised reforms to redress racial disparities in land ownership and the subject remains highly emotive more than two decades after the end of apartheid. Whites still own most of South Africa’s land following centuries of brutal colonial dispossession.
If minority groups have representatives, it helps them to table issues affecting their communities, make decisions in budgeting and distribution of resources.
KAMPALA - Indigenous Peoples (IPs) commonly known as ‘minority tribes’ in Uganda, remain marginalised despite of the various government policies to transform people’s livelihood.
The commissioner culture and family affairs at the gender ministry, Juliana Akonyo Naumo, said many of the IPs remain less educated and are poor compared to other people.
PALAKKAD: The alienation of land and the government machinery’s failure to provide alternate land to the adivasis of Attappadi even under the Forest Rights Act (FRA) has only led to further marginalisation of these sections. The ghastly incident in which Madhu was fatally assaulted by a group of persons goes to show how vulnerable the 33,000-odd Adivasis of 192 ‘oorus’(tribal hamlet) of Attappadi are in the hands of the mainstream population.
MAGDALENA AKINYI* HAD a feeling something was amiss when, in 2012, total strangers started coming over to survey her land in Kakamega. The 46-year-old mother of four eventually found out that her husband, who was working in Nairobi, had married a second wife and sold the 4 hectares of land that he and Akinyi had purchased together during their 12 years of marriage.
“I confirmed he had sold the land, and I decided to sue them both – my husband and the buyer – for violation of the law, as my husband had not consulted me before selling the land,” Akinyi says.
On Monday, Adivasis in Kerala observed the 15th anniversary of what is considered the worst police action against the community in the state’s history. On February 19, 2003, the police evicted hundreds of Adivasis who had occupied the Muthanga forest in Wayanad district to protest the delay in the government’s distribution of cultivable land that it had promised to all landless Adivasis in the state.
For more than a half-century, Indonesia's government-backed economic development has been based on exploiting and exporting the vast natural resource wealth in its waters and forests— often to the detriment of indigenous people who historically occupied these areas. This exploitation has also gone against the customary laws of those indigenous people.
