This Country Insights Digest discusses the topic of microfinance in relation to land loss. Daniel Hayward reviews three articles on the topic and adds some concluding thoughts and questions. Has microfinance merely warped into other forms of rural credit, where the profit margin trumps all other aims?

Land tenure—the formal and informal relationship individuals and groups form with land—effectively determines who uses what land under which conditions. Tenure security is important to promote rural resilience and climate change adaptation, build endowments of assets, and provide adequate housing. But land tenure security is not static.

There are 278 smallholder farmers in Selama Kebele in the Benishangul-Gumuz Region of western Ethiopia. On average, these farmers own 2 - 10 hectares of land. Smallholder farmer Abdulahi Mohammod, age 48, is one of them. To provide for his thirteen children and two wives, he cultivates 6 hectares of crops which include corn, sorghum, soybean and red peppers. With the earnings derived from his land he is able to meet his family’s basic needs, which includes paying school fees for seven of his children.

Early this year, the Arab region saw a series of webinars and meetings about the status of land-related information and data.

This panel took a critical look at the land governance orthodoxy that has consolidated on the heels of the financial crisis and outcry over "global land grabs" at the end of the 2000s.

A 2021 African land rush seems unlikely, but issues persist

Joseph Feyertag is a research fellow at the Overseas Development Institute (ODI), Roger Calow is a senior research fellow at the ODI, and Ben Bowie is a director at TMP Systems.

As part of the Prindex global dataset, people in 34 sub-Saharan countries were asked about their feelings of security or fear regarding possible eviction. Dr Ibrahima Ka and Cynthia Berning share intriguing findings.

Being evicted is one of the most unsettling things that can happen to you – living in fear of eviction is bad for your health and wellbeing and puts your life on hold, stopping you from investing in your future.

The data revolution – characterised by the transition to big data, open data and new digital data infrastructures [1] – is projected to make an astonishing 44 billion terabytes of digital data and information available by the end of 2020 [2]. Despite this plethora of information now available to us, about 1 billion people in 140 countries still feel insecure about their land and property rights [3].

Prindex Researcher Joseph Feyertag argues that corruption holds the key to unlocking tenure insecurity.