What Makes Impact Last: Cadasta at the Skoll World Forum

By Cadasta Staff This month, Skoll World Forum returns to Oxford at a time when the social impact sector is under real pressure to evolve. Across the sector, long-standing assumptions about funding, scale, and sustainability are being tested. Aid is tightening, expectations for accountability are rising, and many of the systems meant to support impact…

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From Policy to Practice: Cadasta and the Jacobs Futura Foundation Partner to Advance Community Land Rights in the Democratic Republic of the Congo

By Cadasta Staff The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is entering a pivotal moment for community land rights.  In July 2025, the President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo signed into law new land use planning legislation,Law No. 25/045. This new law formally recognizes customary land rights within the country’s land use planning…

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Participatory Mapping as an Impartial Intermediary

By Cadasta Staff Typical conflict resolution strategies often require a mediator.  For Indigenous land-related conflicts and boundary validations, participatory mapping and technology can serve that role. Participatory mapping is a community-led process in which local people lead the creation of maps that combine spatial knowledge and lived experience. It is a locally led process, often…

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Forests Don’t Need Saving. They Need Recognition.

By Cadasta Staff Three Key Lessons After Ten Years of Work  Each year, the International Day of Forests (March 21st) arrives with urgent warnings of accelerating deforestation, biodiversity loss, and forests under pressure from climate change, extractive industries, and weak governance. The proposed solutions are often technical or financial, involving greater monitoring, additional offsets, and…

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Webinar: Geospatial Tools, Stronger Land Rights: Insights from Cadasta and Esri, Inc.

By Cadasta Staff Around the world, millions of people live and work on land that is not formally documented in systems that governments can easily recognize or use. Community knowledge about land and resource boundaries often exists only in paper maps, hand-drawn sketches, ancestral lore, PDFs, or disconnected spreadsheets, making it difficult to validate claims,…

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Why Land Rights Are Women’s Rights

Celebrating Women's Month By Cadasta Staff True gender equality is rooted not only in social and political rights, but in something far more fundamental: land. For millions of women around the world, land is the foundation of food security, economic stability, community leadership, and environmental stewardship.  Despite women’s central role in sustaining families and ecosystems,…

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Investing in Malawi’s Future: Sustainable Financing Recommendations for Land Services

In recent years, the Malawi Ministry of Lands has been making big strides in improving land governance. Improvements include passing the 2016 Customary Land Act, passing the 2022 Land Act Amendments, and receiving approval from the Office of the President's Cabinet of the decentralization of land services functional plan. All of these developments help contribute…

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Aligning Policy and Practice in Kenya’s Community Land Governance

By Wambayi Wabwire The Kenya Community Land Act of 2016 (CLA) charted a clear path forward for documenting and recognizing community land rights. A decade later, Kenya is entering a critical phase in implementing the CLA. Recognizing this pivotal moment, the Kenya Land Alliance and Landesa convened a Multi-stakeholder Platform - the Ardhi Caucus, which…

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Strengthening Land Governance in Mozambique: Cadasta and Lantmäteriet’s Collaborative Study

Cadasta and Lantmäteriet, the Swedish National Mapping Agency, are proudly partnering with the National Directorate for Land and Territorial Development (Direção Nacional de Terras e Desenvolvimento Territorial), Cenacarta, ADE, and other relevant organizations to conduct a comprehensive study of the land sector in Mozambique, funded by Sida (the Swedish International Development Cooperation Agency). This initiative…

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Strengthening the Land Rights Continuum: A Pathway to Resilience and Equity

By Cadasta's Carolina Reynoso Pieters & Leah Kellenberger Around the world, millions of people live, farm, and raise families on land to which they have no formal, recognized rights. These communities–Indigenous Peoples, smallholder farmers, women, and residents of informal settlements–face daily risks that undermine their livelihoods, limit their economic potential, and increase their vulnerability to…

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