Community Land Protection Initiative
The Community Land Protection Initiative (CLPI) supports land rights practitioners from around the world to share best practice to support communities to document and protect their indigenous and customary lands. The International Land Coalition, which co-organises the project with Namati and IIED, has gathered all the project resources produced by participants: blogs, “how to” videos and short topical guides to share successful strategies and innovative solutions towards land protection. CLPI also features in the IIED project page focused on helping communities assert and defend their land rights: Assisting communities to seek legal redress for land rights violations.
Strengthening women’s participation in land governance
A new phase has started for this project in Senegal and Tanzania. IIED and local partners IED Afrique and TAWLA have developed workplans for each country, and in January held an inception meeting which started defining activities and agreed expected outcomes. In both countries, the project team is planning to assess the impacts of approaches developed during the last phase of the project to strengthen women’s participation in local decision-making processes on land – particularly issues such as land administration, demarcation and mapping and land use planning. Field activities were due to start in March, however the project team is now reconsidering their workplans due to the COVID19 outbreak. Find out more about the first phase of the project in the 2019 highlights in our digital annual review.
Securing land rights in Cameroon
LandCam continues to engage public opinion, produce research and mobilise rural communities to influence Cameroon’s land tenure reform. A women-only workshop on leadership and participation in local land management was held in November 2019 in Sangmélima. The training reflected on how “31 champion women” could collaborate to address violations of their land rights, and on techniques for community mobilisation and participation in community land affairs. Participants committed to mobilising other women to defend their land rights in their respective villages.
In January, we organised a second micro-grants programme to encourage journalists' reporting on land-related issues, and to highlight stories that illustrate the challenges faced by many Cameroonians over land governance. The resulting articles have contributed to mainstreaming discussion on land in the media. For regular information about our work in Cameroon, subscribe to updates at www.landcam.org
New land laws in Sierra Leone
Rachael Knight, Senior Associate in IIED's Legal Tools for Citizen Empowerment Team, has been working as a consultant for the FAO's Development Law Service, supporting a small team of Sierra Leonean lawyers to draft two new laws for Sierra Leone: a Customary Land Rights Bill, and a Land Commission Bill. Rachael has been working closely with the drafting team to ensure that these laws:
- make customary land rights privately held, and customary land owned, managed and governed by the people who have been living on and using them for generations;
- make all community members co-owners and co-managers of common lands and natural resources like forests, wetlands and grazing areas;
- forge strong protections for communities approached by – and negotiating with – investors seeking lands;
- protect women's land rights and land inheritance, and give women an equal say in all family land transactions;
- ensure that communities are not dispossessed from protected areas, but rather co-manage such areas together with the requisite government agencies; as well as setting out many other environmental protections as well as rights for vulnerable and marginalised groups.
Empowering Producers in Commercial Agriculture
EPIC partners CSRC, NACCFL, WOLREC and IIED gathered in WOLREC’s offices in Blantyre, Malawi in November for two days of sharing and learning. The country teams presented progress so far in year one of the project, sharing reflections on successes and challenges. We then held an international event with participants from producer organisations, civil society organisations, private sector and government from across Africa and Asia, to share experiences of work in support of producers as they engage in supply chain relations. A field visit was organised to the Nsuwadzi outgrowers tea association in Thyolo district, where EPIC Malawi is working closely with Nsuwadzi members. Discussions spanned approaches to supporting smallholders directly to identifying and tackling some of the structural issues faced in rebalancing power in agricultural value chains – presenting both opportunities and limitations for socio-legal empowerment.
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