Now is the time for Africa to digitize land registries, says Joan Kagwanja
The ongoing coronavirus crisis (COVID-19) has added impetus to the need for African nations to create comprehensive, up to date land registries to safeguard ordinary people’s land rights, especially in rural communities, Joan Kagwanja of the African Land Policy Centre said. Speaking during a webinar organized by the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies (PLAAS) to discuss African land rights in the time of the coronavirus, Ms. Kagwanja said COVID-19 has exposed the vulnerability of millions of rural people across the continent raising the need for more transparency and accountability in land governance across the board. Panellists, among them Fatmata Fouard-Kanu of Sierra Leone’s Namati Land Rights Organization; His Royal Highness Stephen Drani of the Forum for African Traditional Authority; and Bernadus Swartbooi, Namibian lawmaker and leader of the Landless People’s Movement, agreed the crisis needs to be better understood if great responses are to be developed to secure people’s access and rights to land now and beyond the pandemic. They also agreed that women across the continent were bearing the brunt of COVID-19 as they have been pushed out of agricultural value chains resulting in drastically reduced incomes and domestic violence in the home. Panelists agreed this underscored the importance of resilience and accountability among local institutions - both state and traditional - in land governance. Digitizing land registries, they agreed, would reduce the expropriation risk for most rural dwellers.
| Format: | Press release biblioteca |
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| Language: | eng |
| Published: |
2020-05
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| Online Access: | https://hdl.handle.net/10855/44904 |
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