Land pathway getting on their Learning route!

By Willem Bettink

This second day has been very dense with discussion and sharing of experiences that has moved the land pathway onto developing its initial thoughts for the learning route(s). The morning session opened by presenting a first digestion of thoughts based on the country experiences presented yesterday. The experiences with various local land use planning shared the concern of the risk to exclude some particular groups of the local population from access to land in particular pastoralists, and very poor women.

An innovative approach by the SWADE-project in Swaziland enabled the integration of local land use planning into local development planning involving the communities throughout the process. This led Sharefair participants in the land pathway to consider if they should address the local land issues in the broader context of a sustainable livelihoods plan instead of as a stand alone issue.

These reflections fitted well with the presentation of the scoping paper¹ prepared by Fiona Flintan, which provides an overview of the benefits and challenges of customary land tenure systems. These include aspects such as: a focus on groups versus individuals; what factors influence the development of the customary system; and what are the challenges for various stakeholders involved.

But how does all of this work in practice-what was learned so far? There needs to be an enabling environment in place; achieving a shared vision and consensus between stakeholders; provision of legal backing for defining roles and responsibilities and a CBO with strong leadership, ownership and capacity.

Halfway though the day the land pathway opened its doors to Ariel Halpern of PROCASUR who completed his Odyssey leaving Chile last Saturday arriving today at the Sharefair at ILRI in Addis. For sure he had not lost his energy to stimulate us with his personal reflections and thoughts. He took us through what is known as the learning route –a tool developed and successfully delivered to support small farmers, women and youth in about 23 countries by PROCASUR.

Learning Routes has proven to be a flexile tool adapting it’s use to a diversity of topics(e.g.local government, land, gender, culture assets, rural business, rural ICTs, rural youth) and a wide range of people and countries specificity. Ariel defined the learning route fundamentals to be:

• Recognize that in rural areas it is possible to find successful solutions to existing and common problems which can be adapted and multiplied in other context; and
• Use a learning strategy that enables participants to acquire direct knowledge and arouse their curiosity and interest in learning.

Mino Hardi from Madagascar, who participated in the learning route on Women and Land rights, said that she started the learning route with a lot of ideas about what to do. The powerful experience for her was to visit communities and see how people had achieved putting similar ideas she had into practice –this gave an enormous push to her motivation to pursue her ideas once she returned form this learning route to Madagascar.

At this deep hour into the day, maps of Africa were pulled out! Participants were asked to map out the challenges they face in their countries, what they have to learn and what experiences/practices they can share. Enough for now, but more to follow tomorrow from this committed lot of practitioners!!!

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[1] Recognizing, formalizing and supporting customary land tenure in multi-use landscapes- Scoping paper (work in progress) by Fiona Flintan for the International Land Coalition.  

Sharing practices to make land tenure securer #sfaddis

By Willem Bettink

The land pathway got underway with knowledge from land right practitioners from Benin, Tanzania, Niger, Madagascar, Swaziland, Ethiopia and the Philippines. The focus of this pathway is to map out complementary good practices and innovations as part of a knowledge exchange programme on the customary land tenure and management systems.

Mike Taylor of the International Land Coalition opened by saying that, “Access to land and secure land tenure are key to poverty reduction”. During this first day participants shared their experiences with local customary land issues. Michael Odhiambo(Reconcile) identified a set of challenges they face in working with pastoralist in East –Africa and how empowerment of smallholder producers- pastoralist, farmers and fisher folk-is one of the ways to address these challenges. A participant stated” Can we empower pastoralists? Or have they been disempowered-as it is they who have all the knowledge about the land.”

As the day progressed it became clear that different countries (Tanzania, Benin, Madagascar) are facing the same challenge. As so often the problem is how we address the challenge together building upon each other knowledge rather then facing it alone deprived of that shared knowledge.

All in all the land practitioners proofed to be people of endurance and passionate commitment as this pathway went on for the whole day- and two more intense days will follow. Hopefully as of tomorrow with the participation of Ariel who has been travelling with his knowledge from Chile since Saturday!!

IFAD, ILC and CTA learning event on participatory mapping

Over 50 rural development practitioners from all over the world and a multitude of organization gathered at IFAD this morning for the learning event on participatory mapping.

The event was jointly organized by International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), International Land Coalition (ILC) and Technical Centre for Agricultural and Rural Cooperation (CTA).

We kicked off the morning session with a presentation by Giacomo Rambaldi who gave an overview of the opportunities and challenges of participatory mapping. In his presentation Giacomo pointed out that:

• participatory mapping is based on spatial local knowledge


• participatory mapping is good for awareness building, cross generational transfer of knowledge + good governance


• spatial knowledge cannot be captured by satellite


• recently smart phones are used to support participatory mapping


• importance of understanding who is in control of the process? who has visual access? what's left with those who supported the mapping?

Giacomo informed the participants that shortly IFAD and CTA will be releasing the "Training kit on participatory spatial information management and communication".

We then watched an inspiring video entitled " mapping our culture, mapping our future". The video showed how communities use participatory mapping to have their voices heard. It was a great example of cross culture and cross continent knowledge sharing. We watch African communities exchanging their experience with their Latin American brothers and sisters. It was an inspiration piece of exchange between different cultures and ethnicities.

For me, the take home messages from video were:

• that fact that the final step of participatory mapping is to look into the future
• participatory mapping gives indigenous groups sense of community and ownership of the future
• participatory mapping empowers local communities to negotiate at peer 2 peer level and gives the voiceless a voice

As I am writing this blogpost, the participants are busy doing a map. I must say, there is a certain buzz in the room. Great conversation, laughter, but also at times some tension. The group is realizing the challenges of engaging in participatory mapping and at the same time are seeing the value of this tool.

This afternoon, we'll have a speed geeking exercise and a chat show. Stay tuned on the blog and follow us on Twitter http://www.twitter.com/ifadnews or follow hastag #pmapping

Better late than never: last post for the Learning Route on Women's Access to Land in Uganda and Kenya

Due to being overwhelmed by a wave of emails and other things, this last post arrives late, from Rome..

Hakuna Matoke: Day 6 to 8 of the Learning Route and its end in Nairobi

After nearly a week together, much friendly teasing was going on between participants, especially of the Ugandans and their love of matoke, the plantain mash that is an essential part of every lunch and every dinner – and those of us not coming from Uganda weren’t missing this too much as we crossed into Kenya. Another noteworthy moment of the trip was our drive through the Rift Valley, I saw pink flamingos from afar and zebras just on the side of the road!

Day 6 we continued on relatively early in the morning to go to Gatundu South district to visit Gatundu Mwirutiri Women’s Initiative. Again, we were welcomed with a singing, dancing, and a round of hugs – something to introduce to meetings in Rome, too, maybe, as it really lightens up the mood! We were led into the courtyard of a house, where a tent had been built to shelter us from the sun. Just behind us, there were some cows, mooing, as well as sheep and chicken. We started the meeting by presenting ourselves, first our hosts, who also sang a song they had specifically come up with that affirmed a woman’s rights, including the right to vote and the right to land.

The Gatundu Mwurituri Women Initiative, or GMWI, is working specifically to protect these rights, by forming watchdog groups at the community level that any woman chased away by her in-laws after the death of her husband can appeal to for help in claiming her inheritance rights. The watchdog groups include members form the community, elders, paralegals, male and female, some of whom had come to share lessons from their work. One man in particular impressed all of us, starting from his introduction: “I am Joseph and I am a grassroots woman.” He experienced injustice against women in his family and decided to do something to fight for equal rights – and that he considers himself as a grassroots woman for that reason. Another male watchdog member present later referred to the reason for his participation in the group as the “grabiosis”, the greed that leads men to grabbing land from women and which he considers to be at the root of a lot of the family disputes over land that occur in the community.

The watchdog groups, which are supported by GROOTS Kenya with training and some funding, are run on a volunteer basis, and it was evident that the drive and dedication of its members was a key factor for their successful resolution of disputes in the community. In addition to the watchdog groups, GMWI also works on HIV/AIDS awareness, encouraging testing so that people are aware of their HIV status and can seek treatment if they have already been infected. GMWI has a group of orphans that meet regularly to help each other rebuild their lives after the death of their parents, including through revolving funds to help them set up small farming and business activities to generate income. One of the girls from the group gave a talk on HIV/AIDS, something which she does regularly to inform other children and youth in the community to inform them about how to prevent infection. She also spoke about the practise of wife-inheritance, i.e. the widow being wed off to another man from her late husbands family so as to “cleanse” her, and which has led to some of the highest infection rates in Kenya in the provinces were this practise is still common.

Following a lunch rice and stew and the sweetest mangos, the programme continued with a role play to tell the story of a family devastated by HIV/AIDS – one of the actors in this role play was Peter, who later took us to his inherited piece of land that he claimed with the help of the watchdog groups after the death of father and mother. His paternal uncle had grabbed the land from him, but thanks to the intervention of the watchdogs, which work in close collaboration with the local administration to make sure that the law is respected, Peter and his sister now have a title to the land in both their names. A key accomplishment of the watchdog groups is their focus on reconciliation of families even in such difficult situations, but also that those who seek help are empowered to stand up for their rights.

However impressive the work of the watchdog groups, however, it is evident that in addition to the problem of property grabbing from widows and orphans, there is a general issue of the perspectives young people have to stay in the rural areas and earn a living from agriculture. The area which we had come to is covered by tea plantations, with farmers producing for a market controlled by the Kenya Tea Board and middlemen buying their harvest for further processing. Peter told us that he was planning to continue his studies, provided he could come up with the money, to become an accountant. He still wants to use the land, but he wants to develop it and will probably, should things go according to his plan, not be farming full time. We all went away from this visit to Peter’s thinking about the pull of the cities, the opportunities opened up by education, and couldn’t help wondering whether staying in the rural areas was feasible or a romantic illusion.

This visit almost eerily prepared us for the next day, when we went to Kayole, a semi-slum (meaning most structures are permanent) on the outskirts of Nairobi, to visit the Young Widows Advancement Programme (YWAP). We were welcomed at the local administration, which doubles up as a community centre, and a dance class was in full swing in the courtyard. YWAP members introduced their stories, moving accounts of women that were infected with HIV/AIDS by their late husbands, who were left in a difficult and previously rarely occurring position of being a young widow, with small children, unable to defend herself against in-laws that wanted property back for their family, as they think that these young women are probably going to remarry, thus taking family property away into another man’s family. In this situation, the women have to fend for themselves, try to earn an income to maintain their children, facing social stigma as widows, thought to be outcasts until remarried. YWAP tries to provide support, immediate with small amounts of money and some space in their offices where women can stay for short periods of time, as well as with information on legal rights to inheritance, including to land in the rural areas. At the same time, they help the women face a live with HIV/AIDS and the fear of death, for instance, through the preparation of memory books about their family history, which they put together for their kids, should they be orphaned at a young age.

In Kayole, we also had a chance to listen to some stories in more depth. We went for house visits in small groups of 4 people, with our host walking to where she lives with us, a building with small bedsits, or rather, rooms, as there are really no facilities to speak of, with a communal toilet outside and the cooking done on a small gas cooker. Our host, Lilian W., is a mother of two who lost her husband, who was a matatu (minibus) driver, and has had to move to Kayole since she could not afford to keep the place they were living in as a couple. Since the death of her husband, Lilian has worked in a vegetable packing factory as a casual labourer, with no social security or anything (no unions allowed, obviously), working night shifts so that she can be back in the morning to take her children to school. Despite this, she has trained to become a paralegal to advise other women, and she told us that she is doing all she can to give her children a good education, so that one day her daughter can be a lawyer. Think of that next time you buy those neatly packed green beans from Kenya!

After the day in Kayole it took us almost two hours to get back to the guesthouse in Nairobi, even though the distance is only about 35 km, the infernal traffic that everyone who lives in Nairobi has to deal with every morning and every evening as they are going to work, be it in an air-conditioned four-wheel drive favoured by expats and rich Kenyans or a crowded matatu that is the only option for the majority of the population, though the latter at least have the liberty to overtake some of the traffic on the pavements and get to their destination just that little bit faster. Day 7 of the learning route was hot, dusty, and tiring, a week of impressions that gave us a lot to think about and ended on a note that was very relevant considering the increasing migration from rural to urban areas.
Day 8: the last day of the Route, a day of closure, as much as that is possible after a week of travelling, listening, discussing, sharing, arguing, singing, being welcomed in diverse places and languages, enjoying hospitality everywhere we went. Before starting, Ariel suggested some time off to go to the Masai market, so participants went and we took some time to discuss how to structure the last few hours. Once everyone was back with their purchases, we worked on the innovation plans, meant to help everyone think through what they learnt, what they liked, and what they think could improve their own work once they get home. It was a quieter day than most as people went off to sit in their project teams discussing what they want to take home. In the late afternoon, everyone presented a short summary of their innovation plans for feedback, and after writing up the hard copies, gave their feedback on the Learning Route itself by filling out the evaluation questionnaire and writing a letter to a future ‘rutero’, i.e. participant in a Learning Route, to tell them about the experience.

On our final evening, at our celebratory dinner, certificates were handed out and many jokes were made, with even those that were slightly at odds with each other during the trip sharing a laugh. We also had a little gift for our massage therapist, Lilia from Madagascar, who contributed a lot to keeping participants happy! After we sang the song composed by Wilkister Oduor from Kenya Land Alliance (“I’m going home to innovate”), there were a lot of hugs and e-mails exchanged, and it seems to me that this was the best result of the Route, it created a lot of contacts, based not only on a common interest in promoting women’s rights to land, but also based on an experience together that all of us will remember for a long time to come.

From Uganda to Kenya: Day 4 and 5 of the Learning Route!

From Kampala, we continued on to Kayunga district – also called the “United States of Uganda” for its tribal diversity - on Day 4 of the Learning Route, where we visited a group of 15 women that have been working with a rights-based organisation called AHURICA (Association for Human Rights and Civic Awareness) on understanding the implications of the spousal consent clause on women’s land rights. AHURICA undertook research in the community, at the same time raising awareness of the Land Act and in particular, the spousal consent clause, which stipulates that any land transaction by either partner in marriage can only be done with the consent of their spouse. The key issue with this is that not many marriages are actually legally registered in the district and in Uganda generally, where marriages are often customary only – what we would probably classify as cohabitation. Also, polygamy is widely practised, across religions, adding another layer of complexity to the question of how to secure women’s land rights.

The women from the Kayunga association, which was formed little under a year ago and is in its incipient stages, shared how they have become aware of their marital status through this action-oriented research project. They shared with us how they have started to feel empowered by the knowledge they gained on the rights of women as enshrined in the Land Act and other relevant laws in Uganda, for instance, those governing inheritance – and how they have started raising awareness by informing their own husbands on the importance of getting their marriages legally registered.

Legally registering marriages were identified as a first step to secure women’s land rights in this context, and the sharing their experience, the participants from Mozambique suggested promoting mass marriages, something they have successfully done in Manhiça district, where they brought 30 couple to the district registrar’s office in December last year to have their marriages legally sanctioned. Sounds like many a man’s nightmare!

Some representatives from the local administration, including the chair of the local council, were present at the meeting, and in fact the role play the women had prepared for us showed how land conflicts can be solved: women whose land rights are violated can report to the local council, which can summon all parties involved to find a solution and ensure that no-one stands above the law. The presence of the representatives of the local administration seems to indicate that there is an opening for women to bring their cases forward, however, it is likely the more progressive and transparent administrators are present, not the ones that are corrupt or ignore legal provisions because their personal belief system does not recognise a woman’s right to own land.

We spent that evening with a round of feedback on the experience of the Learning Route so far so as to improve it for everyone and went to sleep for a few short hours (time of departure for the next morning: 3.30 am!), excited about the next part of the route in Kenya – and happy about our rickety bus having been changed into two more comfortable models so we could spread out and sleep!

Day 5 was mainly spent on the bus and at the border between Uganda and Kenya, where the immigration formalities took a long time – and even so, when we came out walking into Kenya, our buses where nowhere to be seen! Turns out that the Kenyan border police was in a meeting to discuss strike action and hence there was no-one to clear vehicles. So having spent more than two hours waiting, I guess we could count ourselves luck to have passed through before a strike! Once in Kenya, it was quite striking how fast the landscape and climate was changing and it was quite a pleasurable ride, though still a long one! We arrived in Nakuru after 3pm and found a panel of members and partners of the Kenya Land Alliance (KLA), an ILC member, waiting for us to introduce us to the Kenyan context.

Catherine Gatundu from KLA also organised a field visit for us to go and visit two camps of internally displaced people (IDPs) near Nakuru the next day, and two of the panel speakers were representatives from an IDP network. Despite our sorry state after 12 hours of travelling, the panel was lively and gave us a good overview of the status quo of land issues in Kenya – though some of the complexity only started to become evident the next day when we went to see the camps. As we arrived at the first site, we were awaited by MACOFA (Mau Community Forest Association), a member of the Kenya Land Alliance, to plant some trees in the arboretum they are planting for the nearby school. We planted native trees such as avocado (and to my shame, I don’t remember the other ones), one for each continent represented in the Learning Route.

The first camp was desolate, people, mainly young women with a lot of children, living in overcrowded tents on a small plot, working as day labourers on nearby farms to get by, while the second camp was organised, an association had been formed, a committee elected (nearly gender equal, 6 men and 5 women) and money had been pooled to buy more land for farming. We discussed the difference between the two camps that evening, asking ourselves what accounted for the difference between them, as both were camps formed by IDPs that moved on from a camp at Molo town formed after the 2007-8 election violence when this was dissolved. Both camps were established by people using a government “compensation”, paid as a “go back home” package, to buy land since they could not go back to their original homes (in most cases, those who owned land went back to their original community, while those that rented land or had small businesses did not). We discussed the reasons for the different outcomes in the two camps, and one of the key factors seemed to be the ‘englightened leader’ in the second camp, who recognised the importance of involving all members of the association, who contacted Kenya Land Alliance to get information on legal procedures related to land acquisition, and who recognised the importance of going to Nairobi to follow-up with the relevant government department.

The visit to the IDP camps raised a lot of questions for those of us not coming from Kenya, as we were not that familiar with the complex reasons for the post-election violence in 2007-2008. Our lively discussion that evening answered some of those, and by this stage, participants were interacting much more also outside of the programme (in the little space there was!).

Representatives from ILC Latin America and Asia: Patricia Costas and Roshan Jahan

More to follow on the remaining two field visits in the next blog post(s)!

The days are passing by fast on the Learning Route – Summary of days 1-3

Nakuru, 13 March 2010

It’s Day 6 of the Route already and the first time since its start that I find the time (and internet connection!) to write a piece for the blog – there is little free time and working on the bus is next to impossible because of a rather bumpy ride (and a rather basic bus!).

Since we started on Monday with our opening workshop in Kampala, during which all of us presented the work of our organisations, we have visited two communities and participated in two panel discussions - I shall try to catch up with blogging about all this over the next few days! We have travelled nearly 30 hours by bus along roads that are sometimes just a bit bumpy, sometimes muarram, i.e. with no tarmac and very slippery because of heavy rain. The programme is packed and the travel tiring, but the participants are patient and good-humoured (the fact that Lilia, one of our participants pictured below, gives excellent massages helps!). Having been on the road together for a few days has started to forge friendships – which surely is one of the most important outcomes of such a route!

We arrived in Kagadi town, in Kibaale district, late Monday evening to stay on the campus of the African Rural University, founded and run by URDT (Uganda Rural Development and Training), who are also the ones that worked on the action-oriented research project with the community we then visited on Tuesday.

We were welcomed with song and dance (into which some of us enthusiastically joined in as you can see from the picture!) and spent the day hearing from women involved in the project, who had prepared presentations on a range of topics related to women’s land rights, including customary law, polygamy, and HIV/AIDS – in this case by two HIV-positive women that presented their testimony so confidently in front of the whole community, leaders from local and district administration and our group that it clearly showed they have overcome the stigma associated with HIV/AIDS.

URDT used a very interesting approach to work with women from the community, the ‘visioning’ approach. This approach is a shift from the responsive or reactive orientation of research (problem-solving), towards fostering creativity – by envisioning positive change, people involved are focusing on what changes are most important to them and what steps they can take – one at a time – to get there. The women involved in the action-oriented research project, focused on what they wanted in relation their current situation, recognised the gaps and made conscious choices on what needed to get done. It was quite amazing what has happened in this community in the space of under 2 years, for instance, the women founded their own savings and credit cooperatives to make loans to group members and help them invest in improving their agriculture of setting up a small business. For me, the most impressive result was the poise and self-confidence which the women had so obviously gained through their participation. The visioning approach in particular caught mine and most of the participants’ attention and many said they were keen to replicate it at home (and even for their own personal use as a technique to overcome obstacles!).

The women also presented a role play about a polygamous marriage and the problems faced by the 4 wives upon the death of their husband (in this area, Christians and Muslims alike practise polygamous marriage) – and how to solve such conflicts by approaching the local authorities to mediate between the parties. We later visited some households to ask more detailed questions and found out that polygamy in this area seems to be a form of cohabitation in which one man has several ‘wives’, none of whom are legally registered, and all of which have a house and small piece of land- rather than having one home, the husband ‘rotates’, turning up at any of the wives’ houses when he feels like it. All of these wives cultivate a piece each of their husbands land, with all the proceeds going to him – in return, he provides the women with necessities such as salt and candles and takes care of sick children. Not a very good deal for the women, it seems!

We spent a fascinating day sitting in the shade of the trees, with a large group of other community members – and what looked like probably all the children of the village! – as an audience. The welcome by the community was exceptional and all of us learnt a lot to take home with us.

Day 3 we left very early in the morning to return to Kampala for a lunch panel organised by Uganda Land Alliance to share the experiences from the CALI (Collaborative Action on land Issues) project – this was quite a contrast after a day spent in the village, with the Minister of State for Land honouring us with his presence (albeit only for roughly 20 minutes, which is probably normal?), with technical experts sharing lessons from a project that involved civil society, the private sector and government in a national policy dialogue.

The CALI project consisted of studies to feed into policy formulation, as well as regional consultations and a national policy forum to get feedback on drafts of the policy from those affected by it in the rural areas. One of the participants in the grassroots consultations in NorthernUganda, Vincent Oling, stressed that to develop a good land policy, asking for communities to get involved is crucial. He said that there were challenges regarding the representation of the rural population in such consultations – and especially of women. He recommended that consultations should involve a representative sample from the community, rather than just a few people selected by community leaders, which will likely leave out women.
He questioned whether women’s land rights could ever be equal in a context of polygamous customary marriage.

Vincent also brought up the need to look beyond the land policy and start addressing land issues in government policies on minerals, oil, etc. – all of which affect the land rights of communities severely! He also stressed that it is never too late to meaningfully involve communities and that the current draft of the Ugandan land policy should again be shared with communities for another round of recommendations.

So, 3 days gone, another 6 days to go! More tomorrow, internet connection permitting...

Learning route on women’s access to land in East Africa

Kampala, Sunday 7th of March
ILC-Procasur-ULA Learning Route: “Action-oriented research and Policy Influence for Women’s Access to Land in Africa. The experience of Uganda and Kenya”

I arrived late last night at Entebbe airport and woke this morning to a sunny day – it has been raining buckets here in the past week, so this seems a good omen for our Learning Route!

The Route, organised jointly by International Land Coalition (ILC), Procasur, and ULA (Uganda Land Alliance), both of them members of the Coalition, starts tomorrow and continues until 17 March.

The Route includes case studies from the project “Securing Women’s Access to Land: Linking Research and Action” ILC has been carrying out in cooperation with the Makerere Institute for Social Research – MISR (Makerere University in Kampala) and the Institute for Poverty, Land, and Agrarian Studies – PLAAS (University of the Western Cape in Cape Town) over the last two and a half years. The aim is to link research and action by bringing together different stakeholders in small, action-oriented, research projects, accompanied and supported by MISR and PLAAS on the research side and by ILC on the advocacy side. All projects (except Rwanda, unfortunately) are participating in the Route with two people each, with one person coming from the community where research was carried out.

Having been involved in the coordination of the project from Rome, I can't wait to see what has been happening at the community level!

The Route also includes two panels on the work of Uganda Land Alliance and Kenya Land Alliance on influencing national policy, to which different stakeholders including policy-makers, are invited. Originally, the Uganda panel was suppose to be tomorrow, but it turns out that 8 March is a public holiday in Uganda. Why? Because it is International Women’s Day, of course! What better day to start a Learning Route on women's land rights?

Over the next 9 days, we will travel across Uganda and Kenya with a group of 25 people (mainly women!) from 11 countries, including Uganda and Kenya, of course, but also Madagascar, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe (other countries with small research projects under the above mentioned project) – as well as Bangladesh and Bolivia (the representatives from ILC members taking a lead role in coordinating work on women’s land rights in Asia and Latin America respectively).

Tomorrow we open the Route here in Kampala and after lunch we set off to our first destination in Uganda on the Learning Route Bus! We are heading to Kagadi to see the work of URDT (Uganda Rural Development Training) on “Voices of Women’s Aspirations over land and land matters: The case of Kibaale district” from up close. More to follow in the next few days!

Greetings from Kampala to Rome,
Sabine

P.S.: For more information on the Route, go to www.landcoalition.org and click the banner! For more on the IDRC- funded project “Securing Women’s Access to Land: Linking Research and Action”, go to: http://www.landcoalition.org/?p=2891

'Jewish'-Catholic Relations Fraud Ver. 2 Plotted at Castel Gandolfo

Young Jewish, Catholic leaders meet

June 24, 2009

ROME (JTA) -- About 50 young Jewish and Catholic leaders gathered near Rome at a conference sponsored by Vatican and Jewish interfaith bodies.

Some 25 Jewish and 25 Catholic delegates from a number of countries are taking part in what organizers are calling the "first Catholic-Jewish Emerging Leadership Conference to promote and facilitate the next generation of leadership in Catholic-Jewish relations."

Hosted by the Vatican and convened by the International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee, "Discovering Common Values: a Catholic-Jewish Leadership Conference" is taking place at Pope Benedict XVI's summer residence at Castel Gandolfo.

The program, which ends Thursday, includes seminars about the history of Catholic-Jewish relations, training sessions for Catholic-Jewish engagement, and discussion on issues facing Catholics and Jews today.

http://jta.org/news/article/2009/06/24/1006092/young-jewish-catholic-leaders-meet

***

The International Catholic-Jewish Liaison Committee (ILC)—the convened body of the Holy See’s Commission for Religious Relations with the Jews and the International Jewish Committee on Interreligious Consultations (IJCIC)—is delighted to announce the first Catholic-Jewish Emerging Leadership Conference to promote and facilitate the next generation of leadership in Catholic-Jewish relations.

A Steering Committee of emerging leaders was convened in Budapest, Hungary, from 6 November through 9 November, 2008, just prior to the 20th ILC meeting, also held in Budapest. The group of six Catholic participants and five Jewish participants spent an extended weekend learning from one another, visiting local religious communities, and discussing the program for the upcoming emerging leaders conference. These young leaders then served as full delegates to the ILC meeting—the first formal inclusion of next-generation leaders in this forum. The theme and draft program for the upcoming conference emerged over the course of these meetings.

“Discovering Common Values: A Catholic-Jewish Leadership Conference” is scheduled to take place from 21 June through 25 June, 2009 in Castel Gandolfo, Italy. The conference will include seminars about the history of Catholic-Jewish relations, training sessions for Catholic-Jewish engagement, and an opportunity for participants to identify and discuss the current issues they see facing Catholics and Jews today. The program will also include opportunities for visiting local religious communities and participating in a social action project.

The Conference is expected to be comprised of twenty-five Catholic delegates and twenty-five Jewish delegates. Participants should be between the ages of 20 and 35 and should demonstrate a strong Jewish educational background and a keen commitment to interreligious affairs. Although delegates are not required to be employed in the field of interreligious affairs, this program is specifically targeted towards those who will be able to take the lessons and messages of this conference and extend them to their local networks and communities.

Any questions or comments regarding the Catholic-Jewish Emerging Leadership Conference can be directed to Rabbi Leslie Bergson at (212) 751-4000, x460 or bergsonl@ajc.org.

http://www.ajc.org/atf/cf/%7B42D75369-D582-4380-8395-D25925B85EAF%7D/Castel%20Gandolfo%20EL%20Blurb.doc