| Nav: Home > ECA Resources > Press Releases > Press Releases for 2008 |
|
North Africa agree on Regional Draft Land Policy Framework ECA Press Release No. 42/2008 Addis Ababa, Ethiopia 5 December 2008 (ECA) – The three-day regional consultative workshop on land policy in North Africa which opened at the United Nations Conference Centre in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia on 3 December 2008 ended this afternoon with a draft consensus regional background document on land policy in the region. Now that “consensus has been gained on the main revisions needed to revise the regional background document for North Africa,” the document will be used to enrich the draft Continental Framework and Guidelines, according to Mr. Josué Dioné, Director of the Division of Food Security and Sustainable Development at the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA), who chaired the closing session of the workshop. Mr. Dioné, lauded the “level of participation and the passion that each participant brought to the discussion”, adding that North Africa “has a lot to offer in terms of lessons for the rest of the continent … and we will make efforts to ensure that these lessons are widely shared among the various regions in Africa.” Regional consultative workshops are key activities of the “AUC, ECA and AfDB Land Policy Initiative” which is jointly sponsored by the African Union Commission, the Economic Commission for Africa and the African Development Bank to coordinate and accelerate land policy formulation and implementation in Africa. It was launched in 2006. Key recommendations of the workshop note the importance of political will for the effective implementation of previous commitments related to land policy. Accordingly, the participants called on the Land Policy Initiative to scale up efforts aimed at enlisting more political by-in at country and regional levels, including other partners. In this regard, they called for the establishment of some instrument (in the like of the NEPAD’s African Peer Review Mechanism) for tracking progress made by each country and region in the land policy formulation processes that have been agreed upon. The workshop urged all stakeholders in land policy formulation to ensure that the process remains participatory, “governments working in close collaboration with Regional Economic Communities, Civil Society Organizations and other stakeholders, starting with the identification of underlying issues and specificities in each country, all the way to policy formulation and implementation.” Participants praised the three continental institutions (AUC, ECA and AfDB) for the land policy initiative and called on them to continue engaging all the stakeholders at various levels of the process in order to ensure that there is effective ownership by all who have a stake in land reforms. Regular information on the land policy formulation process was highlighted as a factor which could enhance local ownership process by people of the various regions. A list of recommendations circulated at the closing session also states that “many land laws in North Africa are more progressive than those in others parts of the continent, because some of their provisions allow for the inheritance of land by women.” It however, observed that “there are still underlying issues that prevent women from access to land and securing their land rights, including: inadequate access to finance; and some religious and customary based practices that discriminate against women.” “This is especially critical to the harmonisation of land policies among countries in order to facilitate coherent land management efforts across boundaries”, it explains. Despite obvious differences in the way countries and regions tackle land reforms; the core issues are essentially the same in all the regions: population; the nature of property rights systems; land distribution and size; urbanisation and peri-urban development; land tenure and security; access to land; gender issues; water and energy needs; and environmental issues (such as climate change, desertification, biodiversity loss, coastal zone management and forests). As is the case with other regions, one of the recommendations states that key ingredients to sound policy formulation and implementation are: consultations, participation, law enforcement, communication, political will, and resource mobilization. It also observes that there is often lack of continuous, valid and reliable land information, including geo-spatial data which are needed for policy formulation, land administration and monitoring progress made by these processes It regrets inadequate synergies and coherence among other sectoral policies and laws in their development, legislating and implementation, proposing the harmonization of sectoral policies. The Addis Ababa workshop was the last in a series initiated recently by the AUC, ECA and AfDB. Similar workshops have been held for Southern Africa in Windhoek, Namibia (29-31 August 2007); Eastern Africa in Kigali, Rwanda (16-18 January 2008); West Africa in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso (15-18 April 2008) and Central Africa in Yaounde, Cameroon (6-8 August 2008), in view of agreeing on a Framework and Guidelines on Land Policy in Africa. The document will serve as a basis for commitment
and consensus building on important issues related to land policy; and
engaging partners on policy development, capacity building and management
of land resources. It will also provide a framework for regional consensus
and convergence on issues related to shared resources among nations. Issued by the ECA Information and Communication Service
(ECA/ICS). |
| |