Pakistan Railways has leased out around 4,687 acres of its land during the last four years with the aim to transform the department into profitable entity by generating more revenue.
The leased-out land was located in seven divisions including Lahore, Karachi, Peshawar, Quetta, Rawalpindi Multan and Sukkar, an official of the Ministry of Railways told APP.
The day I first met Dr. Tajamul Haque, I did not realize I was meeting the man who would change the trajectory of tens of millions of lives across India – and my own.
Last week the World Cocoa Foundation, a membership organization of more than 100 cocoa companies, held its annual partnership meeting in Berlin, Germany. The aim of the meeting is for governments, cocoa companies and farmers to identify and tackle the sector’s largest sustainability challenges. A 90-minute session was devoted to the topic of land tenure. The prominence of the session, as well as the seniority of the presenters – the Head of Sustainable Sourcing for Hershey’s and the Deputy Director General of Cote d’Ivoire’s Land Agency among them – is a powerful signaling effect.
By Sonkita Conteh, Director, Sierra Leone Program, Namati
Three years ago I wrote about how communities in Sierra Leone were getting the short end of the stick in large-scale land transactions. Many did not understand the provisions of the complex lease agreements they were signing. Not only are these leases legally complicated, they are sometimes signed under pressure and are not always translated into a community’s local language.
This synthesis of our findings from an investigation of tenure risk in East, West, and Southern Africa, shows that a majority of tenure disputes are caused by the displacement of local peoples, indicating that companies and investors are not doing enough to understand competing claims to the land they acquire or lease. This failure in diligence is particularly noteworthy given that a majority of the disputes analyzed had materially significant impacts: indeed, a higher proportion of projects in Africa are financially impacted by tenure dispute than any other region in the world.
A contract granting use or occupation of property during a specified period in exchange for a specified rent.
