Resource information
The Land: Enhancing Governance for Economic Development (LEGEND) Challenge Fund supports innovative partnerships between non-profit organisations and agricultural investors with the goal of encouraging responsible agricultural investment. The £3.65 million fund is a core component of DFID’s LEGEND programme.
The LEGEND Challenge Fund was launched through a call in November 2015 targeting non-profit organisations operating in Ethiopia, Malawi, Mozambique, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Tanzania, and Zambia. Non-profit organisations were asked to partner with a private sector company to demonstrate innovative approaches to strengthening land governance and securing land rights linked to private sector investments. These approaches include the application of recently developed tools for due diligence of land investments and other approaches that apply the principles of the Voluntary Guidelines on Governance of Tenure.
This document provides a summary of the learning questions and main themes of a set of seven pilot projects that develop innovative approaches to the practical management of land rights for a set of private business investments in agriculture and other natural resources.
These projects aim to test practical tools, working methods, partnership arrangements and business models of potential broader value to ensure that land and agricultural investments do not harm the land rights and livelihoods of local communities and participating farmers. They can also demonstrate what needs to be done to enable private investment to create new, win-win economic opportunities for both investors and local communities, so that agribusiness and related investments can be more sustainable and inclusive in the longer-term.
The paper contains a list of the LEGEND pilot projects, learning objectives, and information about target audiences, related initiatives, and the opportunities for wider dissemination of findings and for scaling up successful learning and innovation.