Local communities manage a significant portion of the world’s remaining forests, pastures, and fisheries as common property resources, but they are rarely recognized as formal owners. Important progress has occurred during the last twenty years, as growing evidence suggests that devolving rights to communities can provide incentives for new forms of investment that facilitate sustainable outcomes as well as greater equity in the distribution of benefits.

Over the last 2 years, a bottom-up SDGs monitoring process has been developing in the municipalities of Caruaru and Bonito to give women tenure security. 

Caruaru and Bonito are located in the semi-arid region of Pernambuco state in northeast Brazil, where grassroots women have been supported by Espaço Feminista,a civil society organization dedicated to women’s economic and political empowerment through public policies. 

By Nadra Rahman 

By Deborah Espinosa and Patrick Gallagher, USAID’s Land Technology Solutions Program

Persistent and pervasive gender inequality is a global development challenge that constrains economic growth, educational opportunities, and health outcomes. It jeopardizes food security and undermines poverty reduction strategies. The world over, some formal and many informal laws and customs operate to hinder women’s empowerment and thus their full potential as agents of economic and social change.

A data story from women in a semiarid region of Brazil

*This story was written by the following women: Ducicleide Maria da Silva, Gigliola Silva Araújo, Ianka Sayonara da Silva, Josefa Ferreira da Silva, Maria do Carmo da Conceição Carvalho, Maria Karoline Policarpo Silva, Manuella Donato, Mariana de Albuquerque Vilarim and Thalya Carla Vieira de Lima and Patricia Maria Chaves .  It was translated by Sonia Jay Wright.*  

Rural women demand for accountability on land rights in Africa as we celebrate the second anniversary of the Kilimanjaro Initiative.

On December 11 2018, at the sidelines of the second ordinary session of the Economic Commission of West African States (ECOWAS) Parliament, a parliamentary network on gender equality in land, agricultural investments and food security was launched.

The Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) launched an Alumni Profile Series in which alumni of CCSI’s Executive Training on Sustainable Investments in Agriculture are interviewed about their career paths.

Deciding whether or not to allow an investor to use community lands and natural resources is one of the most important decisions a community can make. Namati and the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI) have published two new guides to help communities prepare for interactions with investors and, if they so wish, negotiate fair, equitable contracts. These guides are the first of their kind.

Land conflicts can be fatal for burgeoning agribusiness or other enterprises located in rural regions, but many companies have limited knowledge of how to anticipate and evaluate land-related risk. This is particularly true for land held under collective arrangements by Indigenous peoples or other communities, which is seldom formally documented.

Vacant Land, or Invisible Risk?

OUR CITY: WHY WE WORK WHERE WE WORK

‘Chicoco’ means mud, the black, fibrous mud that people living in Port Harcourt’s waterfront communities cut from the mangroves and throw down on the river’s edge to reclaim land from the creeks. They build their homes on this mud.

Land is the maker and the marker of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).  For the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA), our aim is to contribute squarely to relevant land-related results where solutions exist and actions are needed, which is at subnational or national levels in countries. We work with national and local governments as well as with other locally mandated actors that in most cases get assistance from international organisations .