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Land Equity International (LEI) is privileged to be awarded a World Bank consultancy to enhance renewable energy investments and access to land in Bangladesh. The activity is funded by the Public-Private Infrastructure Advisory Facility (PPFIAF) of the World Bank.

LEI recently submitted the fourth progress report of the Papua Spatial Planning program or PSP as it is referred to, operating in Indonesia.

Whether deliberate or unconscious, bias makes it difficult for women to move ahead. Knowing that bias exists isn’t enough, action is needed to level the playing field.

This paper was recently published in the December issue of the Coordinates Magazine co-authored between Land Equity International and Planet Partnerships. It is an updated version of the earlier work published under the 2020 World Bank Annual Land and Poverty Conference and the 2020 FIG working week – both events having been cancelled due to the COVID Pandemic.

Recently, we virtually “met up” with Stella Rose Akutui, the Capacity Building and Networking Officer with LANDnet. Stella has been one of many amazing Ugandan women driving the women’s land rights agenda – we celebrate her achievements and the avenues around which Uganda is leading the thinking and action on land rights in Africa.

We are looking for an experienced social safeguards expert who can use their stakeholder and community engagement experience to improve land governance scenarios during infrastructure investment.  This opportunity will see you build solutions with LEI staff for improved land tenure results in the infrastructure sector, expand your networks and work across Africa, Asia and the Pacific with a range of clients. We are initially seeking a consultant role, with potential for more permanent employment arrangements.

We are looking for our next dedicated colleague with experience in land tenure recording and registration, survey, and geospatial solutions for land administration. 

The LEI team from our homes or largely vacated office, continue through the pandemic to consult virtually on advisory teams for projects in Nauru, Pakistan, Philippines, Punjab-India, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam. Beyond our locked borders of Australia, our hard-working project teams in the Mekong and Indonesia have continued to show astounding resilience and adaptation to maintain project momentum. They are continuing to achieve project objectives as they work through issues with their trusted partners and co-implementers most often colleagues from government and civil society.

The poor quality and availability of spatial data has always been one of the biggest challenges in spatial planning in Indonesia, and most importantly in Papua. Further constraining spatial planning and sustainable development challenges, though, is the severely limited technical capacity of local government staff. Recognising this, Papua Spatial Planning – a bilateral programme between the Government of Indonesia and UK, implemented by LEI and Daemeter – has developed a structured and customised training known as On-the-Job Training (OTJT).

Dramatic population growth rates and rising demand for increasingly limited resources have pushed land governance and administration to the fore across Africa.  The East African Community (EAC) comprises of the Republics of Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan and Uganda and the United Republic of Tanzania. The sustained growth of the region; exponential developments in technology associated with land governance and administration; the entry of new actors; and the broader social, political and economic dynamics of the region present a mix of challenges and opportunity.

There have been many articles about the impacts of COVID-19 in the international development space – perhaps best evidenced in our sector by the 100+ articles on land and COVID-19 on the LandPortal blog. Development partners and practitioners alike have needed an unprecedented level of adaptiveness and flexibility to continue activities alongside this global challenge. Now approaching two years into the pandemic, we can begin to take stock. And so, in this article, we want to explore just some of the measures taken in one of LEI’s projects, and what these measures have meant in terms of project delivery of intended outcomes. This ‘taking stock’ is also important as we look to the future of our sector: are there intrinsic lessons from the pandemic response that we will take forward?