Grant for Land Portal

The British Government (UK Department for International Development) has allocated a grant of almost 2 million US dollar to the Land Portal, an open data platform that combines information and data on land and land rights from diverse and credible sources around the world.

The Land Portal will be transferred to a newly founded Dutch foundation, chaired by Leon Verstappen, professor of private and notarial law at the University of Groningen. The University of Groningen (Globalisation Studies Groningen, chaired by Prof. Joost Herman), takes care of the administrative hosting of the Land Portal. The coordination will take place at the office of the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) in Rome.

Land rights fundamentally underpin economic, social and environmental sustainability, yet land governance in many countries fails to protect the world's poorest and most vulnerable people, leaving them at a permanent disadvantage and in a state of instability. How land is governed, from land rights for pastoralist and indigenous peoples to control over large-scale land acquisitions, is a crucial ingredient to improving the livelihoods of the 1.2 billion people currently living in poverty. The vision of the Land Portal is to improve land governance for the benefit of those with the most insecure land rights and the greatest vulnerability to landlessness through information and knowledge sharing.

The Land Portal is a pioneering hub for ‘linked open data’ on land - non-proprietary data that uses semantic tools to share and connect data, information and knowledge. This enables the Land Portal to publish structured data in machine readable, standardised formats under open licenses that can be reused by anyone. The Land Portal Hub is the site's central entry point, providing access to the primary Land Portal services, including the Land Book, Land Debate and the Land Library. The Land Portal aims to become the leading online destination for information, resources, innovations and networking on land.

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Leon Verstappen