by lwang | Aug 29, 2014 | Civil Society, Community Development, Kravis Prize, Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman
Say you find an old dollar bill in a pair of jeans … where does that dollar end up? Paying for your morning coffee? Carefully deposited in your bank account? What is the best way to invest a single dollar? Melissa Warnke, author of “Bang for Your Buck,” an article featured on The Morning News, interviews two dozen people—from a street performer to a head fund manager—about how they would invest a single dollar. Rena Singer, Communications Director of Landesa, a Rural Development Institute founded by Kravis Prize recipient Roy Prosterman, weighs in on the question. Singer outlines the way a dollar goes through Landesa’s Girls Project, a program which educates girls in West Bengal about “their rights to attend school, to not be married as a child, and to one day inherit land.” The project teaches girls the gardening skills needed to create and sustain a home—“a kitchen garden…roof of their house…food that boosts nutrition.” The program is a mere dollar per girl per year. Landesa was also recently named NGO of the Month by Funds for NGO’s. The organization is commended for their work to secure land for the world’s poorest populations and for their inspiring vision of “a world free of extreme poverty,” a vision which earned Prosterman the Kravis Prize in 2006. RELATED: More about the Kravis Prize at Claremont McKenna College A list of past recipients of the Kravis Prize ...
by lwang | Feb 24, 2014 | Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman
The following is a report from Roy Prosterman, Founder and Chairman Emeritus of Landesa. For his work with Landesa, Mr. Prosterman was named the 2006 Recipient of the Henry R. Kravis Prize in Leadership. Since our initial work on land tenure reform took place in what was then South Vietnam – accompanied by a 30% increase in rice yields and an 80% decline in Vietcong recruitment within the South – we have continued to follow with interest any major land-law developments in post-conflict Vietnam. (You may recall that Tim and I were invited back by the Hanoi government in 1993 to do fieldwork and provide an independent confirmation that collective farming had been ended in favor of a system of individual family farms, and that farmers were indeed pleased and more productive under the family-farming regime.) At the time of the 1993 fieldwork, Vietnam had just adopted a new Land Law which gave farmers 20-year rights on land used for annual crops, and 50-year rights on land used for perennial crops such as tree crops. Following our fieldwork, and in light of farmers’ general response, “the longer the better” as to how long they would like their land rights to be, we recommended a regime of permanent use rights for all agricultural land. This issue of the length of farmers’ land property rights has continued to be on the policy agenda in the unified Vietnam, and we are pleased to report that we have just learned from the Government’s English-language website that Vietnam has now adopted a Revised Land Law, to become effective on July 1, 2014, which...
by lwang | Jul 3, 2013 | Kravis Prize, Landesa, Roy Prosterman
What is happening in China? When China unveiled its plan to urbanize over 250 million rural Chinese over the next dozen years, prestigious news outlets turned to Landesa, whose founder Roy Prosterman was 2009 Kravis Prize winner, for its expertise on land-rights issues. In “China’s Great Uprooting,” an article that is part of a series by The New York Times on that nation’s changing identity, Gao Yu, the China country director for Landesa, offered commentary to the news outlet on some major concerns regarding China’s program. Gao first spoke on the impulse to modernize, noting how “[t]here’s this feeling that we have to modernize, we have to urbanize and this is our national-development strategy.” The speed of the development campaign is also a cause for concern as Gao Yu compares it, in the article, to the disastrous Maoist campaign in the 1950s: “It’s almost like another Great Leap Forward.” That said, the new policy could also prevent local governments from forcibly taking over rural land. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, local officials provide limited compensation to the farmers, and then sell long-term leases to factory owners and real estate developers. Li Ping, senior attorney at the Beijing office of Landesa, spoke on the motivations of local governments in an interview with Bloomberg: “Local governments have an incentive to push this distorted urbanization, to grab all that profit.” The modernization policy would increase the involvement of the federal government, which would remove and organize the incentives of the local government urbanization plans. As China’s ambitious agenda begins to be implemented, it is unclear whether it will be successful or damaging to that country’s future but...
by lwang | Jun 21, 2013 | FAWE, Kravis Prize, Landesa, Pratham
The needs of the poor and the disadvantaged don’t stop in the summer, and neither have the efforts of several Kravis Prize recipients, who are continuing to deliver innovative aid to communities around the world. In recent weeks, a new Pratham partnership enjoyed major media attention, Landesa produced an impact video, and FAWE launched a remarkable African research series. ************** The recent partnership between Pratham and the Wrigley Company Foundation was featured in the Times of India. According to the article, the Wrigley Company Foundation announced the launch of a three-year, $1 million educational partnership with Pratham, the largest non-governmental education organization in India. The goal of the new effort is to bring more quality education to underprivileged children in India. Specifically, the initiative plans to target learning gaps in the farming districts of Uttar Pradesh. The organization’s executives hope to reach 40,000 children in 1,000 villages. In an interview with the Times, Pratham co-founder and CEO Madhav Chavan explained that ”Uttar Pradesh has low learning levels as shown by the Annual Survey of Educational Report/2012 and we hope to address these problems in the region.” ************** This month, Landesa released a video to allow viewers to watch what happens when women are given equal rights to land and family resources as a result of Kenya’s new constitution and an innovation pilot program. The short video follows Mary Sadera, who lives in the forested area of Ol Pusimoru. She explains her day-to-day life, as well as how her and her children’s futures will change because of the tribal elders’ new thinking on women’s land rights. View the five-minute video, titled “A Revolution from the Ground...
by lwang | Apr 19, 2013 | Award Ceremony, Escuela Nueva, FAWE, Johann Olav Koss, Kravis Prize, Landesa, m2m, Pratham, Right 2 Play
Kravis Prize founders Marie-Josée and Henry R. Kravis ’67 visited the CMC campus yesterday to present the 2013 Kravis Prize to Johann Olav Koss and his organization Right To Play. They presented the award to Koss during an evening ceremony held in the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum (see photograph below). Click here to read a full update on the ceremony. The award ceremony wasn’t the only item on the day’s schedule, however. Koss also talked about his organization Right To Play with Kyle Weiss ’15, a CMCer who is also helping the world with FUNDaFIELD, which builds soccer fields to help disadvantaged children: Watch an interview between Johann Koss and Kyle Weiss: During the afternoon, five past recipients of the Kravis Prize (from Landesa, mothers2mothers, Escuela Nueva, Pratham, and FAWE) met for a lively discussion of high-impact leadership as part of a “Global Leaders Forum” sponsored by the Kravis Leadership Institute: Click here to read a full update on the Kravis Prize panel discussion...
by lwang | Apr 10, 2013 | Kravis Prize, Landesa, Pratham, Roy Prosterman
Every Indian citizen has a “right to education,” but are they receiving it? Despite attempts by the government to improve education in the Indian province of Uttar Pradesh, this year’s Annual Status of Education Report (ASER), published by 2010 Kravis Prize recipient Pratham, has revealed that the state is falling short on the implementation of its Right To Education (RTE) program. According to Pratham’s report, only 15.6% of schools have achieved a pupil-teacher ratio that meets the RTE requirements. The central government had reported that 38.57% of schools have achieved the proper ratio. The Times of India reports that other experts, adding to Pratham’s quantitative evaluation of RTE, say that: “RTE has boosted enrollment in schools, but the learning outcomes are still very low. “The focus is on infrastructure issues like building, enrollment, teacher-student ratio, mid-day meals but focus on education, a child’s ability to read, write and learn is not visible,” said a primary school teacher.” Until that imbalance is addressed, the efforts of Pratham as well as Roy Prosterman’s organization Landesa will remain crucial to improving the quality of life in India, especially in areas like Uttar Pradesh. RELATED: “Where’s Right To Play Headed Next? The United States” “Celebrity support for mothers2mothers and Pratham events” “A garden makes a difference: Seattle Times spotlights Landesa’s work with young Indian...
