News on Land

The following story is developed from remarks at TEDxJakarta 2019.

The Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO) of the United Nations will work together with The Land Portal Foundation to create a community of experts for AGROVOC’s LandVoc scheme, enriching AGROVOC’s content, relevancy and use for the land and agricultural sector with an online course, along with a one-day workshop in May, 2020.

Six clans in Foya, Lofa County have officially informed the Liberia Land Authority (LLA) that they have identified themselves as separate land communities, completing the first step to acquire legal ownership of land for customary communities in Liberia.

The six clans include Upper and Lower Tengia, Upper and Lower Rankollie, and Upper and Lower Wuam. They made their community’s self-identification declaration at the LLA headquarters at Mamba Point in Monrovia.

The pumps' sensors record real-time data such as energy usage and pump speed in each location, which is then used to calculate groundwater extraction rates and levels

NAIROBI - High-tech solar pumps mapping underground freshwater reservoirs across Africa are collecting data that can help prevent them running dry, the project's developers said on Tuesday.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo, indigenous pygmy communities displaced from their lands for “conservation” and a community leader imprisoned for defending their rights

Members of the organization Fuerza de Mujeres Wayúu (Force of Wayúu Women) have received death threats and been subject to defamation and stigmatization for opposing the harmful effects of a mining project in La Guajira, Colombia.

Force of Wayúu women is part of a group of four organizations that filed a nullity claim for the environmental license granted to the multinational company Carbones de El Cerrejón, which owns one of the largest open pit coal mining mines in the world. The presence of the mine in the region has had a devastating effect on the quality of li

As the country marks 56 years of independence, there is little to celebrate on the steps taken by the government to protect women land rights.

Land access is still a privilege to most women in rural areas. The quest for gender equality on land access and ownership brought forth several reforms. 

The big win was the 2010 Constitution that was a game-changer on matters gender equality and non-discrimination on land rights.

Bernardo Caal is an indigenous Q’eqchi leader from Guatemala currently serving a seven year prison sentence. His crime? Defending the Cahabón River, one of the largest in the country, against two hydroelectric dams.  

The river is of plays a central role in the lives of 195 Q’eqchi communities in the municipality of Santa María de Cahabón, in the department of Alta Verapáz. Today it is under threat from seven hydroelectric projects that have already destroyed hectares of primary forests and hills that are sacred to the Q’eqchi.  

Ercilia Araya is the President of  Pai-Ote, a Colla Indigenous community of 60 people in the Atacama Region of Northern Chile.  Since 2014, Ercilia has been criminalized and harassed for defending her community’s land rights against mining projects, and denouncing the pollution of sacred water sources in the Andes.

The ancestral territory of Pai-Ote is of great mineral wealth and includes the “Maricunga Strip”, one of the most important gold districts in the country. At least a dozen gold mining projects, most of them Canadian, are operating there.

Ranked as a country most vulnerable to the impact of climate change, The Philippines is also the most dangerous place in the world to defend land rights and the environment. President Duterte’s government has enabled seizures of Indigenous lands by an environmentally damaging gold and copper mining project. When communities stand up to defend their land, they face threats, intimidation, criminalisation and even murder.

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Rwanda and Tanzania are among six countries in Africa seen to be working towards securing land rights to at least 30 per cent of their women by 2025.

According to a report by the Africa Land Policy Centre, these six countries—the rest being Botswana, Ethiopia, Senegal and Malawi — have or are working on the policies, institutional and legal frameworks to ensure women have equal access to land.

They also have mechanisms to collect sex-disaggregated and specific data on women’s land tenure security.