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Dear friends,The UN General Assembly during its 69th session, on 22-23 September  this year, will convene a high-level plenary meeting - the World Conference on Indigenous Peoples  – to review the implementation of the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) since its adoption in 2007, and to identify outstanding issues and actions pertaining to indigenous peoples and development.

Dear Friends,What are the prospects for securing the land rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, and women in the foreseeable future?Significantly, the report of the United Nations Secretary-General’s High Level Panel of Eminent Persons on the Post-2015 Development Agenda, under Goal 1 to “End Poverty”, sets a target to “Increase by x% the share of women and men, communities, and businesses with secure rights to land, property, and other assets”.

Dear Friends,The importance of ensuring respect for the rights of forest peoples’ to control their forests, lands and livelihoods, becomes ever clearer and yet more contested. As the articles in this edition of our newsletter starkly reveal, land and resource grabs are not just being imposed by commercial developers but are being actively promoted by governments, whose principle responsibility should be to protect the rights of citizens. Yet these same impositions are also being resisted, sometimes at great personal cost, by local communities and indigenous peoples.

We, the undersigned African civil society organizations, working on and interested in extractive sector issues have decided not to officially participate in the IFC consultative process for Africa, held on November 29 and 30, 2004 in Nairobi, Kenya because of insufficient time and information on the process.

The Batwa of south west Uganda number only a few thousand people and are one of the hunter-gatherer and ex-hunter-gatherer peoples collectively known as the forest peoples (or ‘Pygmies’) of the Central African rainforests.