PRESS RELEASE December 20, 2011 Contact: Rena Singer
[email protected] Tel: (206) 257-6136 3.4 million farming families receive legal access to land in rural China, India Landesa’s model of partnering with governments helps scale programs that provide land ownership opportunities for the world’s rural poor SEATTLE –Landesa, which works with governments and local NGOs to create laws, policies, and programs that provide secure land rights for the world’s poorest, reported today in its 2011 Fiscal Year Annual Report that its partnerships in India and China over the last year helped more than 3.4 million farming families receive secure rights to their land, providing these families with a foundation to escape extreme poverty and build a better future. “Our latest numbers demonstrate that broad-based efforts to strengthen land rights and alleviate rural poverty are most effective when governments are a central part of the equation,” said Tim Hanstad, president and CEO of Landesa, which recently won the prestigious Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship for its focus on citizen-driven change. “Many of our largest funding partners, including the Omidyar Network and The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, recognize the immense value of a policy-based approach in achieving long-term, structural change.” Since its inception 46 years ago, Landesa has partnered with governments on reforms that have helped more than 109 million families gain secure rights to land and the opportunity for a better life. Each of its programs is rooted in the basic idea that the world’s rural poor share two traits: they depend on agriculture to survive, but lack secure rights to the land they till.