News on Land

The Land Portal Foundation has published a Thematic Portfolio on Land & Corruption to provide greater understanding and promote awareness of the intersection of these critical issues.  

Kenya’s 2010 constitution guaranteed women extensive land and property rights. But the message wasn’t getting out to the remote communities of the north until a community radio station stepped in.

GARISSA, KENYA – As sun sets on Sankuri village, a group of women take advantage of the dropping temperatures to convene their weekly business meeting.

Monrovia – The race for land ownership is one of big issues in Liberia that has been engulfed with multiplicity of problems ranging from insecure land tenure forms and rights; lack of land use database for state, private, and customary lands; weak land administration and management; inadequate concession practices and protective mechanisms to prevent “land-grabbing” amongst others.

These issues are causing serious problems for communities’ dwellers to get land for making their farms particularly in rural areas.

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.

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.

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.

On an alarming note, forest degradation continues even though the global rate of deforestation have halved over the last two decades—from a net annual forest area loss of 7.3 million hectares in 2000 to 3.3 million hectares in 2015.

Morris Kidir gestures at a wide expanse of dark-green land he says was earmarked for a school or clinic in his northern Liberian village, now covered in young oil palm trees.

In October last year, he recalls, workers from Malaysian conglomerate Sime Darby arrived at the plot and began filling in the only gap left in a forest of palms that stretch as far as the eye can see.

Colombia - Recognition of collective land tenure rights in Colombia is among the strongest in Latin America: there has been constitutional backing since 1991, and more than 30 million hectares of forests have already been designated as indigenous land. However, this legal protection often falls short of securing rights on the ground.