What we do | Land Portal

The Land Portal Foundation believes that access to information is crucial for achieving good land governance and securing land rights for landless and vulnerable people. Improving access to land-related data and information is our mission. This is what we do:

 

Provide a platform for land data, publications, news, blogs, multimedia content and much more from an international network of organizations and institutions. Aggregating diverse and highly dispersed content helps to make hidden data available to everyone.

Nurture the information ecosystem by linking land databases, bringing fragmented data collections together and enriching content with metadata that complies with Open Data standards and principles. Fostering a healthy and diverse ecosystem of land-related information helps to improve the potential impact of data and ensures information is easily searchable and discoverable.

Stimulate debate among those working on land-related issues around the world through events, discussions and webinars. Online and offline dialogues help raise awareness of hidden issues (e.g. sexual extortion in the land sector) and provide opportunities for collaboration between diverse groups and organizations.

Visualize and synthesize data from diverse sources into unique portfolios of contextualized and actionable land governance information. Our thematic and country portfolios provide free virtual repositories of bibliographic and multimedia resources, helping to reveal new trends and expose existing gaps in the information landscape.

Support information providers from the land sector to utilize Open Data standards and encourage the creation and uptake of a standards-based data infrastructure based upon FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable) principles. The increased adoption of commonly agreed data standards is helping information derived from local groups, national organizations and international institutions to coexist within the wider information ecosystem.

Explain and monitor indicators on land governance including the Sustainable Development Goals, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGTs) and other international/regional frameworks for land monitoring. Showcasing and examining land monitoring instruments is helping to raise awareness and increase uptake of key indicators.

 

The work of the Land Portal is designed to achieve our three core objectives

  1. Improve the documentation, mapping and monitoring of land governance issues.

  2. Democratize the information ecosystem and strengthen flows of land governance data, from all perspectives and all levels.

  3. Promote, inform and enrich the global debate on land issues.

We implement a range of programs and activities, calibrated to meet these core objectives. Here are some examples of recent/ongoing projects by the Land Portal:

LandVoc logo

State of Land Information

 

GeoPortal

LandVoc is a land governance thesaurus created by the Land Portal to establish a common vocabulary for classifying data and information.
SOLI (State of Land Information) is a research study by the Land Portal to map information ecosystems, assess existing information and identify gaps.
Geoportal collates and visualizes statistical and geospatial data on a range of land issues from across the globe.

 

You can read more about the challenges we face, our theory of change, the goals we set ourselves, and the activities we undertake in the documents below. 

Land Portal's Theory of Change (updated 2022)

Land Portal's strategy document (published in 2019, reviewed in 2022)

Land Portal's latest annual report

We collaborate with a wide range of local groups, national and international organizations to achieve our challenging objectives. Find out more about collaborating with the Land Portal.

 

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