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Land rights to legal empower the poor
legally empowering the poor
PRES: When you know your rights, you're more likely demand them. Legal empowerment, as the concept is known, can make life easier for the poor, and in the process improve societies. Kit Cockburn has been exploring how legal empowerment can help the disadvantaged in Africa, particularly by ensuring the right to land.
COCKBURN: The logic goes that by upholding three basic livelihood rights - the right to land, the right to labor and the right to entrepreneurship - the social, political and economic welfare of developing states will flourish. In other words, by making justice affordable and equitable for the poor, development will increase.
Stephen Golub, of the International Development Law Organization, or IDLO, has worked on a series of papers that he and others hope will help to reform legal systems, so that they involve and benefit the poor and disadvantaged. Mr Golub says some success can already be seen in Africa.
GOLUB: In terms of social accountability and how people are becoming aware of their rights, for example to health services in Uganda, translated into concrete benefits in terms of lowered infant mortality and other health indicators. Legal services to help people who have been detained before trial for years and years pioneered in Malawi and then spread to other countries to help them get out of jail if they deserve to.
COCKBURN: But the absence of meaningful land rights remains a major cause for the poor's limited access to justice. Dr Hamid Rashid coordinates the UN's Legal Empowerment of the Poor initiative. He says that recent food and energy crises in Africa have led to growing commercial interest in land:
RASHID: We see an increasing pressure on the land rights of the poor, who are either occupying so called public property or land owned by the government, but now they are facing eviction. Unless there is a mechanism, especially involving community level organizations in negotiating those investment deals, and making sure that their rights are protected we will see that that can be a major source of conflict and a major source of disenfranchisement for the poor.
COCKBURN: Community involvement in establishing land rights is key. In many African countries land is collectively owned. Thomas McInerney, Director of Research, Policy and Initiatives at IDLO, says this is informing research currently taking place in Mozambique, Uganda and Liberia:
McINERNEY: We're looking at how to enable villages to demarcate the land that they've owned communally and then make use of existing positive law that exist in the country to register those claims on a communal basis then setting up the mechanisms by which the communities can then allocate land rights.
For UN Radio, this is Kit Cockburn.
Duration: 2'27"
