admin | October 17, 2016
The Democratic Republic of Congo plans to make all large-scale agricultural contracts public to increase transparency in land deals and to improve the management of natural resources. The government plans to provide summaries of the deals, including provisions relating to social, environmental, and fiscal issues.
The information will be shared via an online database, which will be linked to the global land database: OpenLandContracts.org. A few contracts have already been published, covering hundreds of thousands of hectares of land.
The Rwandan government has also developed a database to manage land use and promote private investment in the country. The Agriculture Land Information System is designed to allow for the regular monitoring of land use and the general state of agriculture. The government’s goal is to promote large-scale agricultural enterprises by facilitating access to land available for commercial use.
To read the full article from DRC, go to: http://news.trust.org/item/20161005040240-0830w/
To read the full article about Rwanda from The New Times, go to: http://www.newtimes.co.rw/section/article/2016-10-12/204392/
Photo credit: Timothy Kisambira