On International Women’s Day, we reflect on the intersection of land rights and gender equity through a compilation of resources featured on the Land Portal’s platform. Women’s access to and control over land is fundamental to achieving sustainable development, economic empowerment, and social justice. However, despite international commitments, structural barriers continue to hinder women’s full participation in land governance.

Transforming Land Administration with Mobile Back Office Centres (MBOCs) in Ethiopia

Development organizations that, in principle, support open data should focus more on releasing project-generated data for others to analyze and re-use. Producing written reports in the middle or end of project cycles is good practice, but not enough to maximize the knowledge captured from projects or for independent audits by third parties. This applies particularly to projects with land governance objectives, as governments – the usual custodians of land-related data – are only minimally opening these datasets up to the public.

The Land Portal has been following the news about USAID’s shutdown with much sadness and concern. During its 60-plus years of existence, the agency has acted on many fronts of international development, funding and managing thousands of initiatives to ensure good health, education, food security, women’s empowerment and, not least, good land governance in many countries of the Global South. 

Land administration has historically focused on economic growth and formalization – now it must evolve to address climate imperatives.

As we reflect on our work at the Land Portal Foundation, we are continually inspired by the transformative power of open data, especially in the land sector. Our newly launched Open Data Champions Initiative celebrates  the small but impactful contributions of open data champions worldwide, particularly those in the Global South, who are driving change at the country level and beyond. TheState of Land Information (SOLI) Program underscores our commitment to benchmarking and making land data more accessible and impactful.

Reliable tamper-proof records with a real time link between Registration, Survey and Revenue departments with common shared textual and spatial data that are geo-referenced and ground-truthed so that there is no need for repeated universal ground survey.

With USAID support, an Afro-Colombian community received a collective land title, guaranteeing ownership of their traditional lands.