Human rights groups want a moratorium on demolitions and forced evictions of informal settlements under COVID-19

NAIROBI/ADDIS ABABA, April 29 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Scores of Ethiopian families are at risk of contracting the new coronavirus after authorities demolished their makeshift houses and left them homeless, human rights groups said on Wednesday.

Authorities in the capital began destroying the informal settlements near Bole International Airport in February.

WASHINGTON, D.C. (April 2nd, 2020)—The first round of Cadasta Foundation’s Data Accelerator Grant has been released to three African organizations to advance land rights and tenure security for vulnerable populations. 

Imagine a community of 200,000. Convivial, walkable, six times the density of Manhattan but with a smaller ecological footprint. It provides low-cost services and affordable housing mixed with productive uses such as recycling, farming and trading. It’s a city within a city.

But the streets aren’t wide enough to allow cars. The houses seem makeshift and the drains need work. The adaptations make it look like a place under perpetual construction.

NEW DELHI - A push to formalise land claims, map settlements and digitise records is not always in the best interests of vulnerable communities, and may even lead to greater rights abuses, analysts warned on Friday.

From Peru to the Philippines, governments are curtailing the rights of indigenous communities and forcibly resettling people in slums, land campaigners say, while mapping lands and digitising land records with the aim of increasing efficiency.

With a population of 163 million people and an area of only 147,570 square kilometers, Bangladesh is one of the most densely populated countries in the world. Land scarcity, insecure tenure, and other factors have contributed to a high volume of land conflicts. Such problems are compounded by Bangladesh’s weak land governance systems, extensive informal settlements in urban areas and widespread landlessness in rural areas.