LARRI is proud to announce that Liz Alden Wily will come to Gothenburg on the 24th of February to hold an open seminar on the theme of customary property in Africa based onher rich experience with community land issues from research and development practice.
Liz Alden Wily is an internationally renowned land tenure expert and independent researcher with wide-reaching experience from a number of countries throughout the developing world but with a particular focus on customary tenure and community land security in sub-Saharan Africa, on which she has published extensively.
Alden Wily is a Fellow of the Rights and Resources Initiative, a Fellow of Van Vollenhoven Institute in the School of Law in Leiden University, and an Expert Associate of Katiba Institute, a constitutional law reform body in Kenya, where she resides for most ofthe year.
Community lands refer to the lands which rural communities traditionally own and govern under customary regimes. While homesteads continue to multiply with each generation, globally, a remarkable proportion of community lands remain shared properties, owned collectively by community members under customary norms. These areas are most vulnerable to reallocation by governments.
The surge inreal or threatened losses is invigorating popular determination to secure formal recognition of community lands as community property. This presentation critically examines progress in Africa, where two billion hectares are unrecognised community lands, belonging by custom to more than half a billion rural Africans. Are they getting legal recognition of this ownership or not?
Please register to Maria Ölund, LARRI project coordinator maria.olund@gu.se