IFAD and land issues

IFAD is dedicated to reducing rural poverty. For this reason over the years the organization has addressed the land issues that affect poor rural people, working mainly in a direct way through projects and programmes but also indirectly through investments in irrigation, water and soil conservation, forestry and agro-forestry and natural resource management.

To learn from experiences and increase its capacity to work more efficiently around land issues in the future, IFAD undertook an exercise taking stock of the 300 projects approved and supported by the organization between 1993 and 2004. The exercise identified 85 projects with components that explicitly addressed access to land and other natural resources. The areas of engagement included:

• formulating and implementing pro-poor land policy
• promoting private property rights through individual titling
• supporting land redistribution
• improving access to common property resources and multiple user arrangements
• strengthening security of land tenure
• resolving land conflicts
• strengthening the links between land-tenure security and land use and sustainable management of resources
• securing ancestral and customary land rights through collective titling
• strengthening decentralized systems of land administration
• developing post-agrarian reform services
• investing in irrigation schemes
• improving access to rangelands by pastoralists

Initiatives have placed particular focus on the land rights of women, pastoralists and indigenous peoples, on secondary and communal rights and on strengthening decentralized land administration systems, both statutory and customary.

In any given context, IFAD adopts a livelihoods and people-centred approach towards addressing land access and land tenure security issues affecting poor rural people.

The organization focuses on:

• empowerment of civil society organizations
• appreciation of the great diversity and dynamic nature of existing agrarian structures and tenure systems, rejection of one-size-fits all policy prescriptions, and a search for context-specific interventions and policy changes
• gender dimensions of land rights
• specific land rights of indigenous peoples 

Source: IFAD

Hot links Community-based natural resources management Factsheet on Linking land and water governance Arabic | English | Spanish | Italian IFAD Rural Poverty Report, 2001 Promoting equitable access to land and tenure security for rural poverty reduction