Landesa Landesa partners with governments and local NGOs to ensure the world’s poorest families have secure land rights, which develops sustainable economic growth and improves education, nutrition, and conservation

Northern Uganda has been plagued by war for more than two decades. In 1987, a rebel movement known as the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) began a campaign of terror and violence. As a result, more than 120,000 people perished, 20,000 children were kidnapped and two million people were internally displaced.  Although a peace agreement was signed between the Ugandan government and the LRA in 2008, the LRA continues to unleash terror in neighboring countries and pose an ongoing threat to Northern Uganda. Since the forging of the agreement, many IDPs and refugees are returning to their former homes.

Current programs include:

Securing land rights for vulnerable women and girls in Northern Uganda.

Landesa’s program seeks to improve the future prospects for at-risk and marginalized women and girls in Northern Uganda. The relative peace has prompted the Ugandan government to close IDP camps and encourage people to move back to their family or clan land. However, for many women, return is virtually impossible. Traditionally, a woman’s access to land is secured through her relationship to a male — her father, until she is married, and then her husband. However, this customary support has broken down after years of conflict and IDP camp life. Many fathers and husbands have been killed, and in some cases, women and girls are rejected by their families because they were raped or abducted.  Landesa plans to partner with local organizations and work with traditional leaders to negotiate the allocation of land to landless women and girls. Many young women organized into informal associations while living in the camps. Providing land to women and girls as a group not only can facilitate their access to land, but also enable them to jointly defend their property rights together and preserve systems of mutual assistance. This project began in May 2010.

Past programs include:

Northern Uganda bio-diversity conservation and property rights reconciliation project (USAID).

Landesa helped design and implement a project targeting sustainable resource utilization in post-conflict Northern Uganda. Landesa facilitated negotiations between industry, local government, international NGOs, and community representatives for land use and development plans, technical training and capacity building, and establishment and management of local teams for project implementation. March to July 2008.

Ugandan land sector analysis.

Partnered with the government of Uganda, Landesa led a team, composed primarily of Ugandan lawyers and social sciences researchers, in fieldwork, monitoring, and evaluation activities aimed at determining the extent to which recent Ugandan legal land and agricultural reform has affected three key areas: (1) women’s and orphan’s rights and access to land and housing; (2) common property regimes; and (3) land markets, land fragmentation, and land consolidation. The government of Uganda used the studies in its ongoing efforts to implement the country’s new Land Act. October 2001 to 2002.