Why Land Still Matters:
Three Years of the Voluntary Guidelines – Where Are We and Where Are We Going?
To mark the three year anniversary of the endorsement of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT), USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management Office hosted an online panel discussion on May 7, 2015, which featured discussants from key stakeholder organizations engaged in implementing the VGGT.
Panelists shared progress, lessons learned, and challenges from three years of Voluntary Guidelines implementation and discussed the next steps and future direction of this important issue.
The panel discussion was open to the public, and everyone was encouraged to join the conversation on Twitter using the official event hashtag #VGGT3yrs.
| Moderator: | |
 |
Heath Cosgrove is the Director of USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management Office and a USAID Foreign Service Officer. Prior to this role, Mr. Cosgrove most recently served as the Director of the Microenterprise and Private Enterprise Promotion office in Washington DC and prior to that as the Director of Economic Growth, Water, and Environment in Lebanon and as the Economic Governance Division Chief in Afghanistan. Throughout his career he has worked in Latin America, Asia, Europe, Africa, and Eastern Europe. |
| Panelists: | |
 |
Paul Munro-Faure is the Deputy Director of the Climate, Energy and Tenure Division of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) based in Rome and has led FAO’s land tenure team since 2000. He has qualifications in land economy, rural planning and public sector land management, with extensive practical experience in the agricultural and urban sectors in the developed market economies, in the transitional economies of Central and Eastern Europe and the CIS, in the Asia/Pacific region and in Africa. |
 |
Annalisa Mauro is the International Land Coalition (ILC) Global Network Coordinator. She has worked in Latin America and Albania in participatory design of rural development projects. In 1999 she joined the ILC Secretariat where she managed the Community Empowerment Facility and the Agrarian Reform Network (ARnet). She has been coordinating the strengthening of the ILC Latin America platform first and the overall network now. In her current capacity, Annalisa is supervising the work ILC does at national and regional levels. |
 |
Dr. Joan Cuka Kagwanja is the Chief of the Land Policy Initiative, an initiative of the African Union, United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB). Dr. Kagwanja is a Kenyan national and holds a PhD in Agricultural Economics from the University of Missouri-Columbia. She has over 15 years experience in African development, having held several positions at UNECA, the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) and the International Livestock Research Institute (ILRI). |