This paper is a synthesis of land issues and land policy constraints in Southern Africa prepared for the World Bank Regional Workshop on Land Issues in Africa and the Middle East held in Kampala, Uganda, in May 2002. It synthesizes key points made in commissioned papers, plenary comments, and facilitated discussions from a special Southern Africa Working Group attended by conference delegates.

This paper describes and analyses people’s security of access to means of production among the Karimojong herd-owners who inhabit the North-Eastern districts of Uganda. It claims that Ugandan statutory land management policy and law undermines the customary tenure system, thereby threatening access security for Karimojong agro-pastoralists.

Sharp inequalities in the distribution of land remains a major cause of extreme poverty in many developing countries. Some instances are the result of ownership patterns inherited from colonial administrations, others are linked to the struggle for economic prosperity in the post-independence era.Landlessness is therefore a significant problem for the rural poor. Most remedies that have been undertaken previously have not yielded positive results, as can be witnessed in Southern Africa today.

Wildlife consumption is an integral part of the livelihood and trade patterns of many peoples in the developing world, and highly valued by them. Yet to date the dominant models of wildlife management in areas of high – and allegedly unsustainable – consumptive use have favoured the exclusion of the users from the resource and the denial of its local values. This gives little incentive to rural dwellers to manage wildlife sustainably.

Assesses the ongoing land registration process in the Amhara Region and its outcomes for women. The paper finds that while land policy and registration procedures aim to guarantee women’s access to land, practice on the ground suggests more needs to be done to support women’s rights in the implementation process.Land registration, initiated in 2003, stipulates that both spouses should be named on the certificate.

The 1998 Land Act represents one of the most important pieces of legislation in Uganda, which is predominantly an agricultural country. The role of a consortium of NGOs, The Uganda Land Alliance (ULA), is analysed in this paper, with regard to the enactment of the Act. The issues addressed include:

Communities of present-day or former hunter-gatherers live in scattered communities across the world, although their precise numbers and status are very uncertain. Their often marginalised status and ethnolinguistic diversity has made it hard to articulate their case for land rights outside Australia and North America. Their preferred subsistence strategy, hunting, is often in direct conflict with conservation philosophies and protected areas often fall within their traditional hunting areas.

Assesses the process of rural land registration in Ghana and its outcomes for poor and marginalised groups.In Ghana, deeds registration has been in place since colonial times, and enables right holders to record their land transactions. However, very little rural land has actually been affected by this registration process. The research shows a general lack of awareness of the registration process among the majority of cash and food crop farmers. High monetary and transaction costs and a long and cumbersome process also constrain use of deeds registration.

Report draws attention to the structure of landholding as a set of mechanisms through which demographic changes in agrarian societies can alter the natural environment: demographically-induced change in the structure of landholding: farm holdings generally become smaller as an ever-increasing number of households enter the agricultural work force and seek to derive their livelihood from this fixed resource base holdings tend to become more fragmented, not simply in the number of parcels operated but in the distances between parcels, as farmers look harder and farther for whatever bits and p

In recent times there has been a renewed interest in relationships between redistribution, growth and welfare. Land reforms have been central to strategies to improve the asset base of the poor in developing countries thought their effectiveness has been hindered by political constraints on implementation. In this paper we use panel data on the sixteen main Indian states from 1958 to 1992 to consider whether the large volume of land reforms as have been legislated have had an appreciable impact on growth and poverty.

This policy brief argues that the time, funding and institutional support required to carry out tenure reform in South Africa have been seriously under-estimated. Reformed tenure rights are ineffective and vulnerable if isolated from other entitlements such as training, finance and integrated development initiatives.

Social forestry emerged amidst important changes in thinking about the role of forestry in rural development and a growing need for fuelwood. In an attempt to alleviate the fuelwood crisis, the World Bank encouraged the planting of Eucalyptus species in its social forestry programs in the 1980s. Eucalypts were the chosen tree species for the majority of social forestry projects because they survive on difficult sites and out-perform indigenous species and most other exotics in height and girth increment, producing wood for poles, pulp and fuel more rapidly.