Centro Terra Viva, Terra Firma Lda and the Netherlands Enterprise Agency (RVO) are excited to announce their partnership for a LAND-at-scale project in Mozambique. Starting this year, the project will run for three years focusing on three components, namely scaling community legal literacy, land rights certification and increasing climate resilience.

About 200 people from Kampot and Kandal provinces gathered yesterday at the Land Ministry asking for two separate disputes with development companies to be resolved.

The protesters asked the ministry to take land from the companies for them to us because they were struggling to make a living.

Bo Sambath, a representative of 308 families from Techo Angkanh and Techo Chrey Bak villages in Kampot province, said their dispute over 1,231 hectares with First Bio-Tech Agricultural (Cambodia) began in 2013.

By: Rina Chandran
Date: 29 December 2016
Source: Thomson Reuters Foundation

Anjali has worked on the land nearly all her life, first with her tenant-farmer parents, and then alongside her husband in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh.

But she has never owned land - a right she has been denied by inconsistent inheritance laws and her community's rigid custom that led her to believe only a man should own land.

Landowning families in Imperi and Jong Chiefdoms, Bonthe District in southern Sierra Leone have commenced legal action in the country’s High Court against African Lion Agriculture Limited (ALA) and Carmanor (SL) Limited to recover possession of around 2303 acres of land. The parcels of land are spread across Nyadehun, Tessor, Niangoihun, Bandajuma, Matakan, MoCharles, Gbaniga and Shenge villages.  The writ issued on 7th July 2016 also seeks the payment of rent arrears dating back to April 2014 and damages for trespass, among other reliefs.

The Arab Spring uprisings have released a flood of land and property conflicts, brought about by decades of autocratic rule. Expropriations, corruption, poor performance of the rule of law, patronage and sectarian discrimination built up a wide variety of land and property transgressions over approximately 30 years. The result has been the creation of longstanding, acute grievances among large components of national populations who now seek to act on them.