Women face many problems with regard to land inheritance and land rights in Kenya. Individual and community land ownership do not favour women. The reason for this is that ownership of land is patrilineal, which means that fathers share land amongst sons, while excluding daughters. This practice is traditionally widespread and partly accepted although it goes against the interest of women and is prohibited by the constitution.

While women’s rights to land and property are protected under the Kenyan Constitution of 2010 and in various national statutes, in practice, women remain disadvantaged and discriminated. The main source of restriction is customary laws and practices, which continue to prohibit women from owning or inheriting land and other forms of property.

Illegal and irregular allocations of public land were a common feature of the Moi regime and perhaps it’s most pervasive corrupt practice. The Ndung’u Report as well as various reports of the Public Investment Committee details numerous cases of public land illegal allocated to individuals and companies in total disregard of the law and public interest. Most allocations were made to politically correct individuals without justification and resulted in individuals being unjustly enriched at great cost to the people of Kenya.

The need for affirmative action and the mainstreaming of the commons community plus a comprehensive strategy to secure indigenous and community land has become a major global concern of the 21st century. To achieve this will require out of the box reform mechanisms and the participation of the communities concerned, such that the reforms recognize and embrace indigenous systems and structures that offer avenues to secure collective rights, land use and management of commons resources; namely pastures, water and forests among others.

The purpose of the research is to assess the land governance system in preventing state land conflicts in Zambia. In order to obtain insights about the actual realities on the ground, based on a case study strategy (i.e. Lusaka District has a study area), the research examined the present status of state land governance system, and investigated the efficiency of the present state land governance system in preventing state land conflicts.

The Land tenure system in Zambia is divided in the following administrative segments: colonial period

1880-1964; immediate post independence 1964-1975, post independence period of one party political

A common misconception in relation to common property situations is that the choice of the legal form will determine whether communal property institutions function well or not. The reality is that whether good, fair management and land administration takes place or not is often largely determined by issues like the following, which can undermine effective governance and land administration irrespective of which legal entity is used:

• Do the majority of residents understand and agree with how land administration processes work?

Land acquisition for development projects by government, private investors and land speculators is a critical source of tensions and conflicts in many parts of Uganda. Following the discovery of commercially viable oil reserves in 2006, Uganda turned attention to extractives and oil development as a matter of national priority. Evidence of this assertion can be found in the recent 2016-17 national budget allocations, where the portion for oil development is substantial.

Northern Uganda is currently recovering from a 20-year long civil war that left the area in ruins. One of the groups, the Lord’s Resistance Army, orchestrated brutal mass murders and abductions forcing nearly two million people to live internally displaced people’s (IDP) camps for over 10 years. The war particularly affected the people of Acholi and Lango sub-regions which had previously suffered sporadic attacks by armed Karamajong cattle rustlers from north eastern Uganda.

The nature and significance of China's engagements with African agriculture continues to be hotly debated in the media, academia and policy circles around the world. Although China has been engaged in Uganda’s agriculture for more than 40 years, the recent jostle for agricultural land by private Chinese investors is dystifying and justifies the need to conduct a scientific study to provide clear evidence before the issue gets bundled into the messy anecdotal media inquiry.

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a study on land conflicts between refugees and host communities in southwestern Uganda and their impact on refugee women’s livelihoods. Uganda has a long history of hosting refugees that dates back to the 1940s, when it hosted Polish refugees; Rwandese and Sudanese in the 1950s (Holborn 1975:1213-1225).

This is the second in a series of land studies for northern Uganda, whose core objective is to inform the Plan for Recovery and Development of Northern Uganda (PRDP) and the National Land Policy. It builds on the work of the first phase conducted in Teso region to present a more quantitative analysis of trends on disputes and claims on land before displacement, during displacement and emerging trends or occurrences on return for Acholi and Lango sub-regions.