In Brasil, 1 percent of the population owns 49 percent of land. Source (Financial Times, 0 April 2010)
In Britain, 0.3 percent of the population owns 69 percent of land. Source (Financial Times, 0 April 2010)
Globally, more people now live in cities and towns than in rural areas
Africa is now the World’s fastest urbanizing region and by 2050, 55% of Africans will be living in urban areas (from 38% in 2000)
Over 90% of new urban development in Africa is taking the form of slums
About 70% of urban population in Africa presently live in slums, and yet occupy less than 10% of urban and peri-urban lands
Research shows that in Africa about 60% of GDP is created in cities and towns
Formal land registration and administration have been unable to cope with rapid urban growth and as a result, between 50-70 percent of urban land in Africa is delivered through informal practices
In Zimbabwe, on 19 May 2005, with little or no warning, the Government embarked on an Operation to 'clean-up' its cities. It was a 'crash' operation known as Operation Murambatsvina and affected over 700,000 people.
In Ghana, some 800 people also had their homes destroyed in Legion Village, Accra, in May 2006, while approximately 30,000 people in the Agbogbloshie community of Accra have been threatened with forced eviction since 2002.
In Kenya, at least 20,000 people have been forcibly evicted from neighbourhoods in or around Nairobi since 2000.
In Equatorial Guinea, at least 650 families have been forcibly evicted from their homes since 2004, when the government embarked on a programme of urban regeneration in Malabo and Bata.
In Luanda, the capital of Angola, at least 6,000 families have been forcibly evicted and have had their homes demolished since 2001.
In Sudan, more than 12,000 people were forcibly evicted from Darusalaam camp in August 2006.
58 per cent of all households in South Africa are living without security of tenure.
In Nigeria, some 2 million people have been forcibly evicted from their homes and many thousands have been made homeless since 2000.
More than 3 million Africans have been forcibly evicted from their homes since 2000.
In Trinidad and Tobago, the 1998 Regularization of Tenure Act established a Certificate of Comfort that can be used to confer security of tenure to squatters as the first step in a process designed to give them full legal title.
Some 25,000 evictions are carried out annually in New York City alone.
In Atlanta, some 30,000 people were forcibly evicted prior to the 1996 Olympic Games, while the oldest public housing project, Techwood Homes, was deliberately de-tenanted because it stood in the way of a 'sanitized corridor' running through to CNN headquarters and the city centre.
Between 40 and 70 per cent of the population of Brazil’s main cities are living in irregular settlements.
Some 720,000 people were forcibly evicted in Seoul and Inchon, Republic of South Korea, prior to the 1988 Olympic Games.
The number of people forcibly evicted to give way to dams in India alone since 1950 has been estimated at 50 million.
The economic boom in China has significantly reduced security of tenure. Rapid urban growth is a major cause of forced evictions. 1.7 million people have reportedly been evicted in Beijing (China) in the run-up to the 2008 Olympic Games.
Everyone who returned to Phnom Penh, Cambodia, after the collapse of the Khmer Rouge regime was a squatter.
In Sri Lanka, large numbers of those displaced by the tsunami in late 2004 are still prevented from returning to their original homes and lands.
The Government of Myanmar forcibly evicted more than 1 million residents of Yangon, Rangoon.
An restitution programme in Kosovo has provided legal clarity regarding tenure and property rights to 29,000 disputed residential properties in the province since 2000.
GLTN News April 2008
We hope that you find the newsletter an informative update on GLTN events and other pro poor land related activities world wide. The purpose of GLTN News is to give an overview of the Global Land Tool Network as well as to inform you about upcoming events and activities. The newsletter is based on the information on the GLTN website. News of interest that is published on the GLTN website will be inserted in future newsletters. Therefore, feel free to register at the GLTN website (www.gltn.net) and upload news, events and contribute to the user conferences.
Over the last few months GLTN has been involved in several initiatives related to land issues in Africa. The reason for this is the thematic focus on Land and Africa in the 2008-2009 agenda of the sixteenth session of the Commission on Sustainable development (CSD-16). GLTN and its partners have been preparing for CSD-16 through a series of activities. An Expert Group Meeting was held on Land for sustainable urbanisation in Africa where key messages for transmission to CSD-16 were drafted. A study was commissioned to assess the social and economic impacts of land titling and home ownership programmes in urban and peri-urban areas of developing countries including case studies in Senegal and South Africa. A regional training program on Transparency in Land Administration was carried out in Ghana. Based on Kenyan experiences, a guide was published on How to Develop a Pro-poor Land Policy. A workshop was held in Tanzania together with FIG on gendering land tools and an expert group meeting was organised in partnership with CASLE focusing on Land Registrars in Africa.
All this lead to the publication of "Secure land rights for all" which will be launched at CSD-16 in New York on 6 May 2008. The publication contains 10 key messages which will be widely disseminated to decision makers at the conference. Three side events will be organised by GLTN partners and the GLTN sponsored participants will be actively involved in discussions with policy makers.
As reported in the last GLTN News, this year started very sadly with the post election violence in Kenya. GLTN was asked to brief the mediation team, lead by Kofi Annan, on the land issues and how a possible way forward could be negotiated. The key findings from the briefing were that the land issue had to be put firmly on the table of negotiating parties, which was done, and thereafter swiftly moving to implementation of pilots and upscaling over the next 12 months to bring reconciliation in Kenya’s land sector. A new Minister of Lands has been appointed, Hon. Aggrey James Orengo whose leadership may be useful for driving the land reform process forward. GLTN continues to interact with the Kenyan government and development partners on the development of the Land Reform Support Programme for Kenya. The publication on "Institutional Harmonisation in the Land Sector in Kenya: A Case Study of the Time Period 2003-2007" is available on the GLTN website.
Furthermore, land issues can provide striking examples of the link between human activity and natural disasters. Global climate change further heightens the vulnerability of many settlements to natural disaster risks. In urban and rural areas alike, the failure to understand the relationship between land and natural disasters has contributed to the increased vulnerability of poor people and has weakened the capacity of poor people to recover from disasters. There is little doubt that the vulnerability of a settlement to disaster, and its capacity to recover from a disaster, is closely connected to the quality of systems for land use, governance and tenure. In response, GLTN and UN-HABITAT, together with FAO, is preparing a set of guidelines and a toolkit for addressing land issues following a natural disaster. This has recently been discussed at workshop in Geneva.
We thank you for your interest in our work and encourage your involvement in GLTN.
Best regards,
Ulrik Westman, GLTN Coordinator, on behalf of the GLTN Secretariat in Nairobi
Nairobi, 30 April 2008
NEWS
New publication - Secure Land Rights for All This publication on Secure Land Rights for All demonstrates how secure land rights are particularly important in helping to reverse three types of phenomena: gender discrimination; social exclusion of vulnerable groups; and wider social and economic inequalities linked to inequitable and insecure rights to land. It argues that policymakers should adopt and implement the continuum of land rights because, no single form of tenure can meet the different needs of all social groups. However, a range of land tenure options enables both women and men from all social groups to meet their changing needs over time. The publication can assist policy-makers to understand and apply the practical ways in which people’s land rights can be made more secure, while at the same time improve land policies as a basis for the better, fairer and more sustainable urban and rural development.
The official launch of the publication will take place in New York at the UN Commission for Sustainable Development, 6 May 2008.
Read more...
GLTN at the United Nation Commission of Sustainable Development The sixteenth United Nation Commission of Sustainable Development (CSD-16) meeting will be held at the United Nations headquarter in New York on 5-16 May 2008. This meeting will be focusing on agriculture, rural development, land, drought, desertification and Africa.
There will be three side events organised by GLTN and its partners at
CSD-16. The side events will be focusing on sustainable approaches to
urbanisation as well as the gender and grassroots dimension of
sustainable land management and administration. The events will be an
opportunity to highlight and debate critical land issues for informed
decisions in regard to sustainable development globally, but also more
specifically in the African context.
Participants will have to register in advance to CSD-16: http://www.un.org/esa/sustdev/mgroups/participation.htm Read more...
Expert Group Meeting on Post-Disaster Land Guidelines FAO and UN-HABITAT are organising a technical meeting to review and revise the draft guidelines and toolkit. The meeting will be held at the United Nations offices in Geneva from 21-23 April 2008. The objectives of the meeting are to:
Ensure the guidelines meet the needs of the humanitarian community, in terms of structure and key issues identified;
Critically review proposed policy options and recommendations on sequencing of interventions; and
Review draft toolkit structure and proposed contents.
Training on Transparency in Land Administration in Nigeria With the emergence of corruption surveys and naming of public institutions with high incidences of corruption, transparency in land administration has taken centre stage. Training is one of the vehicles whereby tools that may help fight and / or prevent land corruption could be provided. The gains of training are well worth the money spent when those who benefited from the training ‘spread the word’ and produce a kind of domino effect.
In line with the post-training engagement agenda of the joint GLTN/TCBB and ITC training program on Transparency in Land Administration, first launched from 22-24 January 2008 at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, Ghana, training participants from Lagos, Nigeria, carried out a follow-up event on 26 March 2008.
Read more...
Land Professionals Workshop on Gendering Land Tools A workshop to advance the process of gendering large-scale land tools is being co-organized by UN-HABITAT and FIG next week in a 2-day workshop (10-11 March 2008) to be held in Bagamoyo, Tanzania. The workshop will be attended by 10 practicing land professionals, drawing from relevant professions, such as planning, law and land surveying.
Read more...
Land for Sustainable Urbanisation in Africa The Expert Group Meeting on Land for Sustainable Urbanisation in Africa took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 21-22 February 2008. Sponsored by the Global Land Tool Network, the purpose of the meeting was to prepare for the thematic reviews on Land and on Africa for the upcoming sixteenth session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-16), which will take place at the UN Headquarters in New York, United States, from 5-16 May 2008.
Read more...
Training on Transparency in Land Administration GLTN and the UN-HABITAT Training and Capacity Building Branch (TCBB) have just finalized the launch of the first training program on Transparency in Land Administration from 22-24 January 2008 at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, Ghana. The International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), in collaboration with TCBB, directed the overall organization of the training including curriculum development and content delivery and the training was carried out in collaboration with three regional training institutions and an NGO: Ardhi University of Tanzania; Polytechnic of Namibia; College of Architecture and Planning, KNUST, of Ghana and ENDA of Senegal.
Read more...
How to Develop a Pro-poor Land Policy
Developing new land policies can be a long and difficult process. It is even more so if the policies
are to be pro-poor – if they are to help correct the disadvantages that poor people typically suffer
in many areas of land policy. This guide on
How to Develop a Pro-poor Land Policy - Process, Guide and Lessons suggests a way forward.
Read more...
Land Tenure Security and Land Administration in Bangladesh Local Partnerships for Urban Poverty Alleviation (LPUPAP)
Today it is widely accepted that secure tenure is one of the pre-conditions to poverty alleviation and effective urban development. Progressive nations and development agencies working in the improvement of slum and squatter settlements are now giving more importance to ‘tenure’ which is differentiated from ownership. Tenure is a term used to convey a wide range of meanings related to the poor’s occupation of space in cities and the legal complexities involved in addressing this challenge.
Read more...
Expert Group Meeting of Land Registrars in Africa Expert Group Meeting of Land Registrars in Africa
From just title to land rights pluralism
26-27 November 2007, Nairobi Kenya
Sitemap
This publication on Secure Land Rights for All demonstrates how secure land rights are particularly important in helping to reverse three types of phenomena: gender discrimination; social exclusion of vulnerable groups; and wider social and economic inequalities linked to inequitable and insecure rights to land. It argues that policymakers should adopt and implement the continuum of land rights because, no single form of tenure can meet the different needs of all social groups. However, a range of land tenure options enables both women and men from all social groups to meet their changing needs over time. The publication can assist policy-makers to understand and apply the practical ways in which people’s land rights can be made more secure, while at the same time improve land policies as a basis for the better, fairer and more sustainable urban and rural development. 
The Expert Group Meeting on Land for Sustainable Urbanisation in Africa took place in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, on 21-22 February 2008. Sponsored by the Global Land Tool Network, the purpose of the meeting was to prepare for the thematic reviews on Land and on Africa for the upcoming sixteenth session of the United Nations Commission on Sustainable Development (CSD-16), which will take place at the UN Headquarters in New York, United States, from 5-16 May 2008.
GLTN and the UN-HABITAT Training and Capacity Building Branch (TCBB) have just finalized the launch of the first training program on Transparency in Land Administration from 22-24 January 2008 at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), in Kumasi, Ghana. The International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), in collaboration with TCBB, directed the overall organization of the training including curriculum development and content delivery and the training was carried out in collaboration with three regional training institutions and an NGO: Ardhi University of Tanzania; Polytechnic of Namibia; College of Architecture and Planning, KNUST, of Ghana and ENDA of Senegal.
Developing new land policies can be a long and difficult process. It is even more so if the policies
are to be pro-poor – if they are to help correct the disadvantages that poor people typically suffer
in many areas of land policy. This guide on
How to Develop a Pro-poor Land Policy - Process, Guide and Lessons suggests a way forward.
