The purpose of this guide is to provide support to those who are assessing and designing appropriate responses to food insecurity and rural development situations. This guide aims to show where and why land tenure is an important issue in food security and sustainable rural livelihoods. The main objective of these guidelines is to provide detailed suggestions for consideration of land tenure issues in rural development policy.

Most land-based livelihoods rely on having secure access to land, a precondition for sustainable agriculture, economic growth and poverty reduction. This working paper examines the state of knowledge with regard to aspects of land reform- redistributive reform, land tenure reform, and the issue of land markets. It also addresses issues that remain unknown in areas of land and social equity, land administration, and land tax.Redistributive land reform aims to bring about an equitable distribution of land and the political power emanating from it.

Most approaches to poverty alleviation focus on income and subsidy measures; however, there is a growing realization that these measures alone are not sufficient. The growing amount of literature on the important role that “social capital” and institutions play in the development process indicates that there is a social-institutional dimension as well. This article focuses on the institutional dimension of rural poverty alleviation and outlines why institution- and capacity-building should be fundamental elements of any strategy aiming at alleviating rural poverty.

Recent years have seen pastoralist communities in Tanzania becoming increasingly impoverished and vulnerable, due to  livestock diseases, drought, fluctuating market prices and unfavourable policies. This paper discusses strategies to address the last of these factors with reference to the Ereto-Ngorongoro Pastoralist Project, which was set up in response to growing concern about the unprecedented and rising levels of poverty among pastoralists in Ngorongoro Conservation Area (NCA).

Secure land rights are important for development and poverty reduction and the greatest challenges for providing such rights are in urban, peri-urban areas, and the most productive rural areas. This publication updates and revises UN-HABITAT’s 2004 publication ‘Urban Land for All’, and stresses the need for policies that facilitate access to land for all sections of their existing and future populations – particularly those on low or irregular incomes.

A new Land Act introduced in Angola in 2004 demonstrates a genuine interest in the protection of the customary land rights of rural communities and underlines rural communities’ rights to their land. However, the documentation of customary rights in Angolan agriculture is limited. This report describes and analyses customary land rights in two villages in Huambo province, both situated some 60 to 90 km from the provincial capital. The report demonstrates that despite of many similarities there exist huge differences in agricultural practices and in how customary land rights are conceived.

Review for sub-Saharan Africa, examines the English-language literature and focuses on four important dimensions of exclusion: (i) exclusion from agricultural land; (ii) exclusion from agricultural livelihood; (iii) exclusion from formal and informal employment; (iv) exclusion from organization and representation.Paper is organized in six sections. The first section discusses concepts of exclusion. The main body of the review examines the four dimensions of exclusion listed above.

Land has historically been a source of dispute and conflict in Rwanda, compounded by the social unrest which resulted in the 1994 genocide. Up to one million people were killed and three million fled to neighbouring countries, leading to weakened political institutions, infrastructure and human capital. Traditional land allocation systems also suffered.

This paper analyzes the impact of land titling on child health and education in Argentina. The authors exploit a natural experiment in the allocation of land titles across squatters in a poor suburban area of Buenos Aires, Argentina, to evaluate the impact of property rights on child health and education outcomes.

In Southern Africa, landlessness due to the asset alienation that occurred during colonial occupation has been acknowledged as one of several ultimate causes of chronic poverty. Land redistribution is often seen as a powerful tool in the fight against poverty in areas where a majority of people are rural-based and make a living mostly, if not entirely, off the land.

This study examines the use and management of natural resources in an area of South Africa at a time of profound political and social change. It takes as its focus the Mutale River valley, which lies almost entirely within Venda, a former black 'homeland' under the South African system of apartheid, and now part of the Northern Province. Venda is situated in the north-eastern corner of the country, adjacent to the Kruger National Park and the border with Zimbabwe.

In urban areas of Cote d'Ivoire, human capital is the endowment that best explains welfare changes over time. In rural areas, physical capital especially the amount of land and farm equipment owned matters most.Empirical investigations of poverty in developing countries tend to focus on the incidence of poverty at a particular point in time. If the incidence of poverty increases, however, there is no information about how many new poor have joined the existing poor and how many people have escaped poverty.Yet this distinction is of crucial policy importance.