Welcome to our new Research and Communications Officer

Naia Webb (on the far right in the photo above) joined the Land Equity International team at the end of last year in a new position in the company as a Research and Communications Officer! Naia brings with her experience in climate advocacy and a passion for impactful storytelling. Naia is a recent graduate from the University of Wollongong and over the coming years we look forward to fostering her career in environmental advocacy. We are keen to use Naia’s skills to strengthen our communication materials and company strategy for project knowledge, while also advancing our research initiatives to support good land governance worldwide.

Land Equity International was invited to contribute to the publication and interviewed Dr. Sochanny Hak (Dr Channy) and Dr Hue Le in an article titled ‘Giving voice to smallholder women farmers in the Mekong Region’ (pp 50-53).  This article discusses the Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG) project which over the past decade has had a key focus on securing land tenure for small-holder farmers. Designed by the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), co-financed by Germany and Luxemburg, implemented by Land Equity International and GRET, and shaped by political economy thinking, the project has intentionally committed to over a decade of momentum building activities. 

It has been a super productive and exciting time here at LEI over the past six months with tenders, international conferences and bigger still, project mobilisations. We won’t be enjoying long summer holidays like our northern partners but aiming for some crisp short winter-breaks down-under instead.

Why did three members of the LEI team travel to Lesotho in the last three months? Because we kicked off with our national and internationally staffed team, a five-year contract by the US-funded Millennium Challenge Corporation to support the modernisation of the Rural Land Registration System in Lesotho, with a particular emphasis on supporting the accessibility and inclusiveness of that system for women! Our contract is called the Land and Gender (L&G) consultancy.

Planning and governance challenges within Vanuatu’s urban population are significant. Port Vila City Council has never adopted a master or local plan to guide and control urban expansion or land use. Likewise, there is no clear government agency responsible for land identification and infrastructure development to meet Port Vila’s growing needs. In one respect Port Vila is in a strong position – there is land that is available for development. But the majority of development to date has been private sector-led, targeting high-income bracket earners, and even this development has been limited by regulatory uncertainty and outdated land administration processes. In the 25-year period between 1996-2020 only 4,100 new residential lots were approved in Greater Port Vila – an average of just 170 new lots per year. The majority of these have targeted high-income households, with varying levels of infrastructure (that is, roads, electricity, water) provided by developers. Affordable housing units for those on lower wages are largely absent on the private market.

In just a few days the World Bank’s newly relaunched Annual Land Conference will commence in Washington DC! The 2024 Conference, which has the theme Securing Land Tenure and Access for Climate Action, aims to highlight effective strategies for securing land tenure and access in support of climate change mitigation and adaption.

Thursday’s inaugural session, “Women’s Participation in Land Governance in the Mekong: Moving Beyond Quotas to Meaningful Inputs and Influence” was moderated by Dr. Elizabeth Daley, Chair of the Land Portal Foundation. The two-hour session involved interventions from six panelists, with representation from Myanmar, Lao PDR, Cambodia and Vietnam and the MRLG Team. The impetus for this webinar was the release of two new publications by MRLG  – MRLG’s flagship publication on gender and land governance, the Outlook on Gender and Land in the Mekong Region  and a specific thematic study, Towards Gender-Equitable Land Policy and Lawmaking in the Mekong Region.

The Grant Facility of MRLG is the leading implementation facility for the four-country program working with more than 50 implementing partners in civil society, government, and academia.

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.

With almost five years since the adoption of the ASEAN Guidelines, Renée Chartres recently travelled to Cambodia to examine their impact on the rubber sector.. She travelled with Asisah Man from Oxfam Cambodia to support Oxfam’s work under the Mekong Region Land Governance (MRLG) regional Responsible Agriculture Investment (RAI) activities focused on gender equality and RAI.. Below are her reflections on this experience.