A favela with over 200,000 residents in Brazil. Image by Alicia Nijdam, Wikimedia Commons.
Global Land Alliance and Terra Nova have announced a partnership and the award of a $US650,000 grant from the Omidyar Network.
The partnership is made possible by the grant, which will facilitate the scale-up of a system to mediate between land owners and favela occupants in Brazil.
Global Land Alliance is a US non-profit that supports property rights reforms internationally, while Terra Nova is an oganisation that aims to document land ownership in Brazilian settlements.
The funding will allow Terra Nova to scale its operations and model, create new payment mechanisms and use new technology to map and document homes, according to the company.
“Terra Nova’s model is proven to dramatically improve the lives of Brazilians benefitting from land regularisation – and yet we’ve still just scratched the surface of its potential,” said André Albuquerque, founder and president of Terra Nova.
“Alongside Global Land Alliance, we hope to bring this innovative model to communities around Brazil and to share with the world our vast data trove on the impact of informal settlement agreements.”
The partnership will also see greater public access to Terra Nova’s historical database, which contains over 2o years of historical data that can illustrate the social and economic benefits of informal settlement agreements in Brazil, according to Terra Nova.
Dr. Malcolm Childress, co-director of Global Land Alliance, welcomed the partnership and funding announcement.
“This partnership highlights Terra Nova’s success in pioneering a model for regularization of informal settlements based on a joint negotiation between occupants, owners, and local governments,” he said.
“We are excited about the potential global impact of this partnership, with the goal of solving housing and urban development challenges worldwide.”
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