Integrated Land and Resource Governance II (ILRG II) Quarterly Progress Report: Jan – Mar 2024

Introduction

The purpose of the Integrated Land and Resource Governance II (ILRG II) Task Order is to provide support to the Land and Resource Governance (LRG) Division in the Center for Natural Environment in the Bureau of Resilience, Environment and Food Security (REFS) at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) to develop, implement, assess and evaluate interventions that secure land tenure and resource rights and strengthen LRG systems. ILRG II will help identify constraints and barriers to secure land and resource governance to support multiple development objectives, including combating climate change, promoting food security, supporting biodiversity conservation, enabling gender equality, women’s empowerment and social inclusion, engaging with the private sector, preventing and mitigating conflict, supporting sustainable urbanization and enabling localization, among others. ILRG II will provide technical assistance services to strengthen and secure the land tenure and resource rights of women, men, Indigenous Peoples, local communities, youth, persons with disabilities, and other marginalized and underrepresented populations in USAID-presence countries. It aims to improve the LRG systems that are responsible for implementing these rights, as well as strengthen the capacity of stakeholders to better advocate for their own rights. It will support rigorous research and analysis to improve understanding of what works and does not work to achieve these outcomes, including the linkages between land and resource governance and other development outcomes. Through this work, USAID seeks to promote development of equitable and resilient societies where land and resource governance rights are respected and utilized to create broad-based growth for all.

To secure the land tenure and resource rights of local people and communities and strengthen LRG systems, ILRG II seeks to achieve the following four objectives:

1. Strengthen enabling environments to promote inclusive legal and policy frameworks for land and resource governance in formal and customary settings;
2. Enhance the capacity of key stakeholders and partners in government, civil society, local communities and the private sector to implement inclusive land and resource governance laws and practices;
3. Build innovative partnerships with the private sector that enable responsible land-based investing to promote resilience; and
4. Support robust monitoring, evaluation, research and learning activities to improve land and resource governance programming.

ILRG II is a five-year contract that was awarded in September 2023. This second quarterly report covers January to March 2024. During this quarter, ILRG II began in-country implementation work on the mid-term evaluation of the Indigenous Peoples Alliance for Rights and Development (IPARD) program in Panama and Honduras and continued to provide technical and capacity strengthening support to key non-governmental and governmental stakeholders in the women’s land rights, wildlife, and natural resource space in Zambia, building on relationships established under the ILRG program. Scoping work continued for the Gender Equality and Cocoa Climate Activity (GECCA) to promote women’s empowerment and sustainable agroforestry in Ghana with funding from the Gender Equity and Equality Action (GEEA) Incentive Fund at USAID, as well as the Washington funded Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment (GEWE) Cocoa activities in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire. ILRG II developed terms of reference for the Environmental Defenders grant program, and held initial discussions on the Green Cities/Adaptation work stream, which may support peri-urban land use planning in Malawi. ILRG II also supported a number of smaller research tasks.