Includes genesis of the CFJJ-FAO programme – policy and legal reforms, challenges for land governance today, legal empowerment and land governance; the twin-track approach; the training programme – paralegal courses, local government and sector officer seminars; results and impact – overall impact, gender issues and women’s land rights; discussion; a format for change – the empowerment chain. Important to have a long term view. The law indeed is not enough.

What can an analysis of power in local communities contribute to debates on women’s legal empowerment and the role of paralegals in Africa? Drawing upon theories of power and rights, and research on legal empowerment in African plural legal systems, this article explores the challenges for paralegals in facilitating women’s access to justice in Tanzania, which gave statutory recognition to paralegals in the Legal Aid Act 2017. Land conflicts represent the single-biggest source of local legal disputes in Tanzania and are often embedded in gendered land tenure relations.

Improving women’s ability to securely access land is recognized as an effective means to increase gender equality and advance other key social and economic development goals. Despite progressive laws in many African countries, gender disparities commonly persist in women’s access and ownership of land. Although legal empowerment of women can help to strengthen their claims to land, governments commonly lack the capacity to offer legal services.

Includes setting the scene: accountability in large-scale land acquisitions; the role of the law in shaping pathways to accountability; citizen action – how effective are the bottom-up checks and balances?; under what conditions can citizens achieve justice and equitable outcomes in relation to land acquisitions?; what role for research?

Since 2014, a set of initiatives in Cameroon, Ghana and Senegal has worked to help people harness the law in order to have greater control over decisions that affect them in a process of legal empowerment. In the three countries, the initiative developed diverse approaches, responding to different local contexts and theories of change. Each embodied a distinctive combination of grassroots action, public advocacy and private sector engagement – through supporting junior lawyers in Cameroon, grassroots committees in Ghana and locally negotiated “land charters” in Senegal.

From the mid-2000s, a commodity boom underpinned a wave of land use investments in low- and middle-income countries. While agribusiness, mining and petroleum concessions often involve promises of jobs and public revenues, they have also prompted concerns about land dispossession, exclusionary investment models and infringements of the rights of vulnerable groups. One of the major challenges is in empowering rural people to make informed choices, exercise their rights and have their voices heard.

This report draws lessons from experience of using legal processes to secure local resource rights within the context of foreign investment projects in Africa. Security of local resource rights is a major challenge in many parts of Africa. The analysis of relevant law reveals that resource rights associated with more powerful interests (foreign investment) tend to enjoy greater legal protection compared to those held by local resource users.

In many parts of Africa, legal services organisations have developed innovative ways for using legal processes to help disadvantaged groups have more secure land rights. Their approaches, tools and methods vary widely – from legal literacy training to paralegals programmes, from participatory methodologies to help local groups register their lands or negotiate with government or the private sector through to legal representation and strategic use of public interest litigation.

Contains background, policy responses (PRSP, LSSP, national gender policy), legal responses (Constitution, co-ownership, Land Bill 1997 and Matembe Clause, Land Act 1998 and Consent Clause, Land Amendment Bill 2003), challenges, way forward, annexes.

A toolkit of 26 items designed for people designing or improving community-based paralegal programmes. It draws lessons from both grassroots experience and research. Includes

The first of 7 Working Papers presented at an FAO regional technical workshop for sub-Saharan Africa on legal empowerment of the poor (LEP) in Nakuru, Kenya, in October 2006. Divided into 7 issues: land markets, individualised land tenure, and land titling; pluralism; informal settlements in urban and peri-urban areas; gender; decentralisation and institutional development; pastoralism; dispute settlement. Each issue is examined through four dimensions: the international, the colonial, the national, and the social.

Impossible to have imagined 50 years ago that Africa’s ruling political elites would have come to despise their own small-scale farmers and pastoralists and to look kindly on foreign-run large plantations. Impact of decades of structural adjustment programmes forgotten. Sceptical about claims that land grabs can be stopped within 3 years. Looks at variety of responses attempting to address power inequalities at local levels. Research a not unproblematic area. Concludes with case studies of legal empowerment in Mozambique and Namati’s community land protection programme.