Policies and practices for securing and improving access to and control over land in Ethiopia
ActionAid Ethiopia
Plus: the outcome report and the proceedings of the thematic dialoque held on 17 January 2006 Addis Ababa.
Review of literature suggests that in Ethiopia lack of adequate access to and control over land is among the major reasons for rural poverty and food insecurity. Literature also shows that since the Imperial era that ended in 1974 up to the present, tenure insecurity, landlessness, diminution of farm holdings, and lack of proper land administration system are among the persistent problems of the rural land tenure system. In rural Ethiopia, regardless of restricted access mechanisms stated by de jure situations since the 1975 reform, many mechanisms of access to land have been active in the country. These include both the formal administrative and informal and customary ways: administrative land redistribution, intra-family transfers and land transactions, land access through community membership, and resettlement and squatter settlement. These land access mechanisms have different characteristics and had given different levels of access to different groups of the rural people. Administrative land redistributions that mainly characterized the military regimees rural land tenure (1975-1991), which have also continued to some extent under the present government, have been carried out arbitrarily by local political and administrative officials. Young peasants, women, pastoralists and ressetlers and other displaced people were among those groups of the rural society that were negatively affected by such a transfer mechanism.
Event: A vision for the future : International Conference on Agrarian Reform and Rural Development
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