Landesa champions to secure land rights for millions of the world’s poorest women and men to provide opportunity and promote social justice.
Most of the world’s poorest people share three traits: they live in rural areas; they rely on the land to survive; and they have insecure rights to the land they rely on.
Their insecure rights over their most important asset — land — casts a long shadow over their lives.Without secure rights to land, farmers do not have the security, incentive, and opportunity to make the long-term investments in their land that boost agricultural production and income.
Landesa partners with governments and local organizations to strengthen land rights for women and men at scale. Laws, policies, and programs bring transformational changes on a large scale. Once families and communities have the security, stability, and opportunity provided by land rights, other important development interventions — like education, clean water, and nutrition — can take hold.
Landesa works in the regions of the world where extreme generational poverty is most prevalent and therefore the potential impact greatest: India, China, several countries throughout Sub-Saharan Africa, and Myanmar.
Because Landesa partners with governments, the work is durable and impact leveraged, with hundreds of thousands or sometimes millions of women and men benefiting from a new innovative program or progressive law.
Over the last 50 years, working in more than 50 countries, Landesa has helped strengthen land rights for more than 120 million families.