An Update from LEI

The LEI team have managed, collaborated and innovated throughout the past year across multiple projects in locations including the Mekong, Nauru, Bangladesh and Indonesia. We have also delved deeply with various partners bidding on projects in Africa. These have been exciting and rapid knowledge-juggling periods.

LEI were operating three different projects in Lao PDR this year: a short consultancy to support digitalisation and enhanced systematic land registration, together with the World Bank and national government’s Department of Lands; and two projects which continue in their 2^nd and 9^th year respectively, the Transformative Land Investment and Mekong Region Land Governance project. These latter projects have been extremely active in operating on various tenure and agricultural investment practices and policy matters for the benefit of smallholders and forest dwellers. It was particularly gratifying to see the projects combine efforts in September to successfully cohost the 2-day National Multi-stakeholder Dialogue on responsible agriculture investment. The collaborative efforts of both projects is huge and required regular communication with partners, fortunately eased by the ability to meet face to face. By visiting the Facebook page of MRLG, you’ll be able to follow an illustrative journey of the meet ups, thanks to communications officer Leonard Reyes, who joined the team in January – keep an eye on the website at the end of January to see all the updates, www.mrlg.org. We look forward to launching project materials, like MRLG’s Gender Outlook which will be presented via a Land Portal webinar on the 15^th February 2024.

LEI, supported by our project team in Indonesia, recently published a video sharing the results of the Papua Spatial Planning project, Indonesia, click here to view our project page and to watch the short 3 min video. In addition to publishing our communications, Renee Chartres who joined LEI in July 2022, recently prepared a discussion piece and guidance for DFAT for including women’s tenure security and access to land in their international gender equality strategy. Renee has also penned a Land Tenure and Land Administration Guidance Note designed for internal purposes to assist the World Bank task teams incorporating these key topics for consideration within the Country Climate and Development Reports (CCDR). We’re proud to be contributing to leading the thinking and critical reporting around climate and gender policies for key development partners like the World Bank and DFAT. Doing so is key to LEI being able to ”improve the lives of people by improving land governance and tenure security”, LEI’s mission.