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 | 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...
by lwang | Nov 30, 2012 | Community Development, Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman, Sustainable Development
When President Obama made history by becoming the first U.S. president to visit Myanmar, he caught the attention of inaugural Kravis Prize winner Roy Prosterman. Prosterman founded Landesa to advocate for international land law and policy reform, and his latest contribution to Landesa’s Field Focus blog applauds President Obama’s remarks on the importance of land rights. Prosterman’s post noted that the president’s Nov. 19 speech at the University of Yangon drew a clear connection between the right to self-government and property rights – and the fact that the two together can help lead to prosperity. In his speech, the president said: “When ordinary people have a say in their own future, then your land can’t just be taken away from you. And that’s why reforms must ensure that the people of this nation can have that most fundamental of possessions—the right to own the title to the land on which you live and on which you work.” That notion is central to Landesa’s mission and its work, and Prosterman’s blog post asserts that securing farmers’ rights to the land they till and the crops they raise is key to fulfilling Myanmar’s agricultural promise and improving rural livelihoods: “If Myanmar does not protect the land rights of its largely rural citizenry who have labored for years in their fields with government control of their planting and marketing, and address the further issue of its large population of completely landless rural poor, it cannot build a solid foundation for sustainable development that will lift the country out of extreme poverty.” His post also quotes President Obama’s offer of assistance to Myanmar’s...
by lwang | Nov 9, 2012 | Community Development, Landesa, Poverty Reduction, Roy Prosterman, Sustainable Development
Inaugural Kravis Prize winner Roy Prosterman founded Landesa to apply his expertise in land reform, rural development and foreign aid to addressing the challenges of landlessness around the world. According to a recent article in Context China, Landesa has worked with the Chinese government since 1987, paying particular attention to state expropriation of farmland and compensation for farmers. The Ministry of Agriculture, among other organizations, has helped Landesa secure land ownership for nearly 86 million Chinese farming families. Context China contributor Wen Liu recently interviewed Prosterman about the organization’s work in China, including a discussion about what led attracted him to the country: Our work in China began in 1987, quite straightforwardly, because we saw initial publicity that China had broken up its collective farms and that agricultural production had substantially increased as a result. If this were true, we thought, it would be a striking instance of an erstwhile centrally planned economy of great size abandoning collective farming as a failure and replacing it as family farms, and we wanted to see it for ourselves. We did field work on this in 1987 (invited by the Foreign Affairs office of Sichuan province) and again, more extensively, in 1988 (invited by the Development Research Center of the State Council). The article highlights China’s sixth land rights survey, published by Landesa in 2011 and identifying the widespread problem of Chinese farming families lacking proper documentation of their land rights. Prosterman elaborated on the finding: Under the law, Chinese farm families are supposed to receive two documents confirming that they have 30 year rights to the small parcels of land that...
