Ethiopia's land administration sector has undergone significant improvements over the last decade. With approximately 50 million parcels of land, around 30 million have been demarcated and registered, and 25 million parcels have received Second Level Landholding Certificates (SLLC) digitized in the National Rural Land Administration Information System (NRLAIS). Despite these advancements, most rural landholders continue to rely on informal land transactions after initial registration, primarily due to the distance between kebeles (sub-district) and woreda (district) land offices.

Photo: Kandukuru Nagarjun, via Flickr, CC BY 2.0

The recent series of ALIGN articles shed light on how civil society, impacted communities and rights defenders across the world have used strategies such as legal action, publishing of mining contracts and stakeholder dialogues to change approaches to land-based investment governance.

Good Land Governance is a governance system that aims to protect the property rights of individuals and enterprises based on following good governance principles like accountability, transparency, the rule of law, effectiveness, efficiency, equality and public participation (Espinoza et al, 2016; Zakout et al., 2006). The line of criticism applied to notions of Good Land Administration or Good Land Governance is their vague and rather declarative character.

The spillover effect that brought the big smiles of the rural women 

By Mesai Mitiku (GIZ)

There are 278 smallholder farmers in Selama Kebele in the Benishangul-Gumuz Region of western Ethiopia. On average, these farmers own 2 - 10 hectares of land. Smallholder farmer Abdulahi Mohammod, age 48, is one of them. To provide for his thirteen children and two wives, he cultivates 6 hectares of crops which include corn, sorghum, soybean and red peppers. With the earnings derived from his land he is able to meet his family’s basic needs, which includes paying school fees for seven of his children.

PhD research provides key inputs to strengthen our knowledge base on land access, land governance and challenges related to development, crisis and resilience. This is why LANDac reserves a special place in the programme to discuss their contributions.

Advancing women’s land rights is a priority for the international development agenda. Yet, there is no consensus on which rights should be monitored and reported. Three indicators of women’s property rights are widely used in the literature. Each captures a different aspect of women’s land rights, but a recent paper explores the extent to which these different rights are held by the same person, using data from six African countries.

Secure land and resource rights are critical for household wellbeing and livelihoods in many developing countries, where land is the principal asset for the rural poor.

Using data collected from over seven million land records, this study examines the extent to which a systematic registration and certification program has contributed to women’s land tenure security. The Land Investment for Transformation (LIFT) program is a six-year DFID-funded program that aims to improve incomes of the rural poor and enhance economic growth in Ethiopia.