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After 10 years of civil war, Burundians are ready for lasting peace. This IFAD documentary, co-produced with the Television Trust for the Environment (TVE) for broadcast on BBC World, follows the stories of three people who are attempting to rebuild their lives. Through their stories, the film explores the larger challenges that face the country and the role that international development can play in preventing conflict from re-igniting.

The World Bank supports a Land Tenure Certificates project to re-issue titles with spaces for the names of both, husband and wife. These titles allow women to have equal access to credit in order to start a small business or scale up to more productive agriculture. In fact, women’s legal status, such as their right to own land, can become a gateway out of poverty. The project added women's names to 35,000 land title certificates in two years. The project was conducted along a national & local information dissemination campaign to raise awareness, as well as to help the Government to issue guidance on providing these joint titles nationwide.

Julio Jankoña, a rural Bolivian farmer living in the heart of a major coca-growing region, has a good reason to smile: the government has given him a title that grants him legal ownership of the land that Julio and his family have been working since he was a child.

"In the old days, one bore such titles of nobility as Grazmach and Qegnazmach and held land. The land was cultivated by tenants who also performed menial labour for the landlords. The noblemen even used to prevent other people from setting foot on their land. The present government redistributed land in such a way that everyone received an equal amount of land regardless of status."

 Read voices from:

• Ethiopia
• Kenya
• Lesotho
• Peru

Representation, through huts, of the land that formerly belonged to the Indians. Above, the words "The land that had been mine, the dragon grabbed".

Statement by the President of the International Fund for Agricultural Development Lennart Båge.

Hear why a woman's right to own land in developing countries is crucial to achieving many of the Millennium Development Goals...

Many Angolans fled to Luanda, the capital of Angola, during the country’s long civil war seeking shelter and protection from conflicts in the outer areas.
But land rights in the city’s capital have been confusing and complex for some time, and date back to the country’s independence from Portugal in 1975. Insecure claims to land and informal housing have made poor Angolans vulnerable to being forced out of their homes, and a registration system to document land tenure has essentially been paralyzed over the 27 years the country was at war.

A 14-minute participatory video production by PAFID - Mindanao  documenting a journey to the land of the ancestors of Higaonon Indigenous Peoples living in Portulin, Bukidnon, Philippines.  The virtual journey recreates experiences lived up by the members of the community in using a physical participatory 3D model to document, share across generations and safeguard their intangible cultural heritage.

Mr. Liu is a small farmer in China’s Anhui province. In 1994, as part of a central government pilot project, he and his neighbors in Anhui’s Fuyang City received 30-year land use rights to the 1 to 2 acres of land they till. Their land rights have remained secure since that time—free from interference by local officials.

12, 500 Rupees (US $275) each is a substantial sum of money for Panchala, Kummari, and Kurma—three landless women accustomed to making 50 cents a day as agricultural workers. But it was a price they were willing to pay for two and a half acres of good farmland. And it was a price they were only able to pay because of an RDI-designed project component that is making it possible for the poorest of the rural poor in India’s Andhra Pradesh state to purchase land.

Jiyappa is a former “bonded laborer”—an indentured servant who lived and worked in his master’s house and farm fields in exchange for basic food, a primitive shelter, and 700 Rupees (US $16) per year. That was before he was hired by the Deccan Development Society (DDS), a local NGO working to economically empower the poorest of the rural poor. In 1993, the DDS employee’s association helped Jiyappa and fellow DDS workers purchase small house-and-garden plots of about 1/10th of an acre.

Our work on land reforms has ensured the reversal of over 6,000 acres of agricultural land to landless Dalits in Gujarat.

One of the most complex and contentious issues in East Timor is land ownership. More than 400 years of Portuguese administration was followed by 24 years of Indonesian occupation. In 2002, the country gained full independence. The result of centuries of foreign control is a pattern of overlapping or conflicting land claims that can inhibit development and cause conflict.

'How do you attract investment if people can't even be confident about the land they want to build on?' asks former Melbourne land valuer and property law lecturer, John Leigh, who is rebuilding from scratch the country's entire land titles system.

Despite the fact that we have the right over land recognized, oil companies  are invading our territory, often using violence and supported by the  government," says the leader of the Sarayaku, an indigenous Kichwa  community from Ecuador's Amazon region.

Despite the fact that agrarian conflicts are on-going, preventing peasants’ access to land, the government refuses to take action to defend poor peoples rights.

A large-scale copper mining company versus local development.

En Brasil, debido a la falta una verdadera reforma agraria, cohabitan juntos inmensas explotaciones agrícolas inexplotadas y millones de campesinos sin tierra. El Movimiento de los Sin Tierra busca a equilibrar este reparto ocupando a la fuerza las tierras abandonadas.
La región de Bagé ha sufrido varias olas de colonización procedentes del norte del Río Grande do Sul. Al convertirse en propietarios, estas familias campesinas deben hacer frente a numerosos desafíos para securizar sus instalaciones. Agrónomos y Veterinarios sin fronteras ayuda a las familias instaladas en esta zona de reforma agraria mediante el apoyo a la estructuración de filiales agrícolas (leche, hortalizas…)

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