Secure land rights are central to unlocking the potential of youth around the world; to activating a new generation of agricultural innovators and empowered young women.
Landesa’s Issue Briefs provide a closer look at how land rights can improve lives and have a positive impact on the world’s most persistent challenges.
In 2019 the world lost 46,000 square miles of forest every six seconds. The destruction of these forests – which shelter a kaleidoscope of plant and animal species, offer livelihoods for indigenous and local communities, and store vast amounts of carbon necessary to mitigate climate change – is preventable. With strong land rights, women and men across the globe can slow down deforestation and contribute to restoring forests.
Enshrining land governance and land tenure security within policy frameworks is essential to providing a foundation to support women and men smallholder farmers, and indigenous and local communities across the Global South sustainably manage their lands and better adapt to the effects of climate change. Doing so is also critical for governments to effectively manage climate displacement to prevent further poverty, inequality, conflict and land degradation.
This brief makes the case that smallholder farms can be more productive than large farms. Investments in infrastructure, technology, inputs and land rights for small farmers – especially for women – can boost agricultural productivity, create employment, reduce poverty, and empower women.
This issue brief describes the best practices to overcome barriers against securing women’s rights to land to unlock the socioeconomic benefits gained when rural women have secure rights to the land they farm and build a home upon to support themselves and their families.
An overview of commercial land acquisitions around the world outlining the historical context, facts, misconceptions, risks, benefits, recommendations for investors, and resources for further reading.
This issue brief establishes the link between improved land rights, particularly for women, and subsequent benefits in improved household food security and nutrition. When farmers, especially women, have more control over assets like land, they are better equipped to grow and purchase nutritious food for their families.
Property rights to land represent the key institutional asset on which rural people build their livelihoods. The nature of farmers’ property rights to land substantially impacts their willingness and ability to adopt productivity-enhancing inputs and investments.
Developing countries are moving toward corporate farming as a way to boost production and jump-start agricultural development. But the basis of their strategy, the assumption that bigger farms are better farms, is one of the most enduring myths influencing agricultural development policy around the world.