This paper documents the changes that have taken place during the lifetime of the conflict management work in the Karamojong Cluster undertaken by the Interafrican Bureau for Animal Resources (AU/IBAR), a specialised technical agency of the African Union’s Directorate for Rural Economy and Agriculture. Its mandate is to support and improve animal health and production in the continent of Africa.In publishing this review, AU/IBAR hopes to contribute to debates among the peace building community in the region and more widely, and to build on the contributions of Oxfam GB, ITDG and others who have offered documentation of lessons learned through field-based peace building efforts.

This publication focuses on women’s roles in saving and reproducing seed in the drylands of the Deccan Plateau, in South India. Detailed farmers’ accounts of why seed-saving is essential emphasise the interconnectedness between self-reliance in seed, crop diversity and nutrition. By extension, the realms of food culture and religious rituals (which entail the use of traditional crops) are also linked to seed autonomy. What is most significant about the intertwining of seed-saving, crop diversity and nutrition is that these three realms are largely under women’s control. However, the processes of industrialisation and institutionalisation in the seed sector are undermining the very basis of autonomous seed production.

Can Land Registration Serve Poor and Marginalised Groups? Summary Report draws on case studies in Ethiopia, Ghana and Mozambique. This research has shown that land registration is not inherently anti-poor in its impacts and that the distributional consequences of land registration depend on the design of the process and on the institutions responsible for its management. Land registration systems can be designed so as to address the risk of bias against poorer and marginalised groups. To protect and secure the land rights of these groups, attention needs to be paid to registration processes with regard to language used, registration fees, geographical accessibility; to recognising and recording “secondary” land rights; to establishing effective accountability and oversight mechanisms for the institutions implementing registration programmes; as well as to inclusive dispute settlement institutions. The study shows the need to avoid “one-size-fits-all” solutions and documents considerable experience from which to learn.

This paper examines the impact of the promotion of agri-business on small holder farmers in the Niayes area of Senegal. The Niayes area was chosen because of the development of commercial farming in the region and because the expansion of peri-urban areas has created growing markets for agricultural produce. This work is part of IIED’s programme on transformations in West African agriculture and the role of family farms which aims to feed into the development of agricultural policy.

Land Registration and Women’s Land Rights in Amhara Region, Ethiopia assesses the ongoing land registration process and its outcomes for women. While land policy and registration procedures aim to guarantee women’s access to land, practice on the ground suggests more needs to be done to support women’s rights in the implementation process. Land registration, initiated in 2003, stipulates that both spouses should be named on the certificate. However, research findings in one-third of all kebeles in Amhara, found that only 39 per cent of the plots was registered under joint title, while 29 per cent was under female holding (including many female headed households), and 33 percent registered with men. Married women therefore continue to be denied joint titling. Most local land administration committees were only composed of men and local leaders and government officials had not promoted women’s participation. However, where women were part of committees, they were active in protecting women’s rights, particularly of women who were vulnerable and lacked family support or social networks.

Land Registration in Amhara Region, Ethiopia assesses the process to establish a system of land registration and improve land tenure security, and its outcomes for poor and marginalised groups. The registration process is generating conflict at the local level, due to illegal land grabbing, encroachments into common lands and land sales. Those who are likely to be marginalised by the ensuing disputes include youth, for whom landlessness is a real concern, and migrants. Women, especially divorcees, and the elderly are other groups which are vulnerable to marginalisation, as they often have to look to others to sharecrop their land. There is also a fear that land registration will lead to ‘privatising’ common lands, so important for the landless. For land registration to yield the anticipate benefits of tenure security and environmental conservation, more emphasis is needed on awareness raising, capacity building at woreda (district) and community levels, support for conflict resolution mechanisms, and women’s involvement in the process.

Land Registration in Nampula and Zambezia provinces in Mozambique assesses the process of rural land registration in Mozambique and the outcomes for poor and marginalised groups. The research shows that community land registration, under the 1997 land law, can strengthen community rights to use and benefit from their land in relation to outsider interests in land. However, intra-community and intra-household land rights are not addressed, since it is only community land boundaries which are registered. The relatively centralised and complex registration procedures means that  smallholder farmers are heavily dependent on NGOs to facilitate the process, which raises issues of continuity and sustainability. Individual registration of land is  possible too, but is mainly taken up by private investors and companies. There are some serious shortcomings in this process: community consultations, required by law, are often inadequate and there is little supervision to ensure that compulsory land development plans produced by investors are implemented in practice. These issues will need to be tackled in order to for rural land registration be really pro-poor in practice.

Securing Land Rights in Africa: Land Registration in Tigray, Northern Ethiopia assesses the strengths and weaknesses of a simple, inexpensive, village-based land registration system put in place between 1996 and 1998 in one of the poorest States, Tigray, of one of the world’s poorest countries, Ethiopia.  The system worked well and fairly in large part due to those characteristics; but this success also depended on effective local governments which were able to prevent inequities from unforeseen shortcomings.  At the same time, those same shortcomings are analysed and also serve as lessons:  that the choice of a land description technology has consequences in use; that title is a legal conclusion that must be constantly updated to be reliable; that registering all the land of a household together under the name of the household head may lead to unnecessary recording problems and inequities when transactions, such as divorce, occur; and that intersections between registration systems (e.g., urban/rural, individual/community, small-holder/investor, cultivated/forested) may create problems.

Para muitas pessoas, a gestão de recursos naturais é algo comum, mas a maioria não tem a oportunidade de contribuir para as políticas e as instituições que governam seu uso. A iniciativa das Ferramentas de Poder visa a preencher esta lacuna. A iniciativa, coordenada pelo IIED em parceria com ONGs e pesquisadores de políticas na África, na América Latina e na Ásia, desenvolve e compartilha ferramentas, táticas e procedimentos para garantir a influência das políticas para fins de mudanças. A Caixa de Recursos contém Ferramentas de Poder: manual das ferramentas e dos recursos para influenciar as políticas sobre a gestão de recursos naturais, e 26 cartões sumários.