Post Type: Article

Originally appeared on Exposure.

OUR MOST IMPORTANT ASSET IS LAND

In Zambia, agriculture supports the livelihood of over 70 percent of the population, including 78 percent of women.

For women and men in Zambia – as in much of the developing world – land is one of the most important assets. Clear, secure rights to land empower people to make long-term investments that reduce extreme poverty, improve food security and address climate change.

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BUT RIGHTS TO LAND AND RESOURCES ARE OFTEN UNCLEAR AND INSECURE

About 90 percent of the land in Zambia is under customary control outside of the formal legal system, administered by traditional authorities, such as chiefs and headmen. The vast majority of rural Zambians live on these customary lands without formal property documentation.

Maps showing the boundaries of fields, forests or villages are often inaccurate or non-existent. The result is a lack of clarity over rights and responsibilities.

In a recent survey in Zambia’s Eastern Province, 91 percent of rural people stated a desire to acquire some form of paper documentation for their land.

Read the full photo essay on Exposure.

Secure land rights play a vital role in improving food security and nutrition while reducing extreme poverty and hunger. We know that farmers who are confident that their rights to the land they cultivate will be respected in the future, are more likely to invest in improved production practices, such as soil and water conservation or tree planting, that can help boost their yields and ensure their land will remain fertile for years to come. When secure property rights can be traded, whether through sales or leases, the most capable farmers, including women and the poor, are also able to acquire more land to grow their successful farms – and their neighbors can access capital to invest in off-farm enterprises that have knock-on effects and are an important building block to create more resilient rural economies.

That’s why USAID’s Land Office is committed to help secure land rights for farmers and rural communities. Today, in recognition of Feed the Future’s progress, we are sharing traditional recipes from some of the countries where USAID’s land rights programs have helped women and men improve their harvests and increase their incomes. Bon appetit!

 

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Doro Wot (Red Chicken Stew)
From Ethiopia

Ingredients
(10 Servings)

• 5-8 pounds of chicken drumsticks and thighs skinned and cleaned
• 8 large onions finely chopped
• 2 cups of vegetable oil
• 5 teaspoons minced or powdered garlic
• 2 teaspoons minced or powdered ginger
• ½ cup of authentic Ethiopian berbere
• ¼ cup of paprika
• 2 teaspoons korerima
• 2 teaspoons wot kimem/mekelesha
• 2 teaspoons salt (as needed)
• 1-3 cup of water

Directions

1. In a large pot, simmer onion, garlic and ginger with vegetable oil till lightly brown.
2. Add berbere and paprika, continue to simmer for about 15-20 minutes at low heat stirring occasionally and adding a touch of water as needed to avoid sticking.
3. Add chicken and simmer until chicken is done while adding the remaining water as needed.
4. Finish simmering and add salt, korerima, wot kimem (mekelesha).

Serve hot with injera (Ethiopian flat bread made of teff).

 

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Roasted Lamb Shank
From Tajikistan

Ingredients

• 1 teaspoon salt
• ½ teaspoon ground cumin
• ½ teaspoon ground coriander
• ¼ teaspoon chili pepper
• 3-4 small lamb shanks
• 3 tablespoons olive oil
• 1 pound of tomatoes, quartered
• 2 teaspoons chopped parsley & basil

Directions

1. Heat oven to 300 degrees Fahrenheit.
2. Mix the salt, cumin, coriander, and chili pepper together.
3. Season the lamb shanks with the spice mixture on all sides.
4. In an ovenproof pan over high heat, sauté the meat in the oil until brown on all sides. Add the tomatoes, cover with a lid, and cook for 2 ½ hours.
5. Remove the lid, and cook for another 30 minutes, flipping the shanks halfway through.
6. Take out of the oven, and let rest 10 minutes.
7. Pull the meat from the bones, trying to keep it in large chunks.
8. Remove the skin from the tomatoes.
9. Garnish with chopped parsley and basil.

Serve over flatbread – with cooking liquid as desired.

 

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Mchicha (Spinach & Peanut Curry)
From Tanzania

Ingredients

• 2 pounds of spinach
• 1 ½ ounces of peanut butter
• 1 tomato
• 1 medium onion
• 2 teaspoons curry powder
• 1 cup coconut milk
• 3 tablespoons butter
• 1 teaspoon salt

Directions

1. Wash and chop spinach. Peel and chop tomato and onion.
2. Mix peanut butter and coconut milk in a separate bowl and set aside.
3. Heat butter over medium heat in sauté pan. Add onion, tomato, curry powder and salt to pan and sauté until onions are soft – approximately 5 minutes.
4. Add spinach and cook until wilted. Add peanut butter and coconut milk mixture to pan. Gently simmer for 5 minutes. Serve with rice, chapati.

 

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Xoi Dua (Sweet Sticky Rice)
From Vietnam

Ingredients

• 2 cups of glutinous or rice (soak in warm water for at least 1 hr.)
• 1 cup of water
• 1 cup of lite coconut milk
• 3 drops of green food coloring
• ¼ teaspoon of salt
• 4 teaspoons of sugar
• ¼ cup of unsweetened shredded or shavings of coconut (optional)

Directions

1. Drain the glutinous rice in a colander.
2. Place drained rice in a mixing bowl and add salt, sugar, and food coloring. Mix well until all the grains have an even color.
3. Add water, coconut milk and rice mixture to a non-stick pan with a lid. Turn heat to medium high and place the lid on, periodically removing it to stir the rice. Rice is done when it is sticky and translucent green.
4. Remove the rice from the stove and let it cool for about 5 minutes. Stir in shredded coconut if desired. Serve at room temperature.

Recipe from: Simply Vietnamese

 

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Dessert: Flan de Chocolate
From Colombia

Ingredients
(6 Servings)

Caramel

• 1 cup sugar
• ¼ cup water

Flan

• 5 eggs (whites and yolks)
• 2 egg yolks
• 1 can sweetened condensed milk
• 1 can evaporated milk
• 1 cup heavy cream
• 1 ½ tablespoon sugar
• ¾ cup cocoa powder

Directions

1. To prepare the caramel, put 1 cup of sugar in a small pot with ¼ cup of water. Bring to a boil over high heat. Stir once and reduce the heat to medium and cook about 5 minutes or until the syrup turns a caramel color.
2. Immediately pour an equal amount of the caramel into each ramekin or any ovenproof mold you want to use. Swirl each dish to coat the base with the caramel, work fast as the caramel will harden quickly as it cools. Place all the ramekins in a large roasting pan and set aside.
3. Preheat the oven to 350 F.
4. In a medium bowl, using an electric mixer, mix the eggs, egg yolks and 1-½ tablespoons of sugar for 2 to 3 minutes. Add the condensed milk, heavy cream, evaporated milk and cocoa powder and mix for 1 more minute.
5. Carefully pour an equal amount of the flan mixture into the caramelized ramekins in the roasting pan. Then add hot water to the roasting pan, not to the ramekins, until the water comes halfway up the sides of the ramekins.
6. Place the roasting pan in the oven and bake for 1 hour or until a knife inserted in the center of the flan comes out clean.

Recipe from: My Colombian Recipes

Question: Dr. Quisumbing, tell us about yourself; what is your professional background?

Answer: I am an economist by training, and have worked on intrahousehold and gender issues, land and property rights for 20 years at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). I came to IFPRI after working at the University of the Philippines and the World Bank. At IFPRI, I led the gender and intrahousehold research program, and co-led work on poverty and economic mobility and gender and assets.

Question: You have researched women’s land rights in a variety of countries in Africa and Asia. What does your research show about the importance of women’s land rights in these different contexts, and their relationship with other important development issues?

Answer: Women’s land rights play out differently in different countries and contexts. The importance of women’s land rights to poverty, economic mobility, and sustainable agriculture crucially depends on country and context, including the women’s ability to own and invest in other types of assets (including their own human capital) and the availability of non-farm economic opportunities. In Bangladesh, for example, our work on the intergenerational transmission of poverty shows that it is the husband’s land that matters for the household’s ability to move out of poverty in the long run—but that is because very few women own land in the first place. In the Philippines, which has a more egalitarian inheritance system, parents tend to bequeathe land to sons, but invest in daughters’ education, enabling daughters to move out of agriculture into better-paying non-agricultural jobs. In Ghana and Ethiopia, stronger land rights for women are associated with women’s greater ability to undertake investments in soil productivity, such as tree planting and adoption of climate smart agricultural practices. Decisionmaking rights are also important: in Uganda, we found that that adoption of orange sweet potato, which has been disseminated to reduce vitamin A deficiency, is more likely on plots that are jointly owned by the husband and wife, but in which the wife has the primary decision-making role on what to grow. The fact that women’s land rights have different implications in different settings means that we need to understand the social and cultural context of land rights when designing the appropriate intervention to strengthen women’s property rights—not just land rights, but rights over resources, more generally speaking.

Question: What are some of the key challenges faced by women in acquiring stronger land rights?

Answer: The biggest challenge comes from deep-seated gender norms that discriminate against women by denying them rights to property, particularly land. There still are entrenched beliefs that women should not own land, because they are not farmers. Obviously, this has no basis in reality, because many women farm, but old beliefs die hard. There also are other beliefs that women depend on men and should not own property in their own right. And even if legislation mandates equal property rights between men and women, in many cases women are not aware of their legal rights. For example, even after a successful community land registration effort in Ethiopia, the gap between men and women in knowledge about different dimensions of land rights is quite large.

Question: How are these challenges being dealt with? What steps should donors and practitioners take to help secure women’s land rights and ensure that their programming does no harm?

Answer: These challenges are being dealt with in creative ways. There are efforts being undertaken by national or state governments, such as reforms of inheritance law and family law in India and Ethiopia, respectively, joint titling efforts in Vietnam, as well as efforts being undertaken by local governments, NGOs, and civil society organizations. In a Helen Keller International homestead food production program in Burkina Faso, where men do not believe that women are farmers or should hold land, the program negotiated with community leaders to lease land for a community garden, where women were able to plant vegetables. Women were also taught how to plant nutritious vegetables in their own home gardens. In intervention areas, qualitative work found that attitudes towards women as farmers, and as land owners, had shifted favorably—a change in attitudes that wasn’t found in areas where the program did not work. In West Bengal, Landesa’s Nijo Griha, Nijo Bhumi (NGNB) program allocates land to poor households and promotes the inclusion of women’s names on land titles. Finally, in Tanzania and other parts of Africa, community-based legal aid programs employing paralegals are helping to educate women about their legal rights as well as providing assistance in claiming these rights. These are just a few examples of what can be done, both at the policy level and on the ground.

Question: Moving forward, what do you see as the key research questions that need to be examined further with regards to women’s land rights?

Answer: I think that we still need to document more systematically the nature and extent of women’s land rights, over the entire spectrum of use and control rights to full ownership. We also need to understand more fully how such rights are shared with men, and exactly what joint control and ownership means in different contexts. It would be good to know what types of policies and interventions work best to strengthen women’s land rights, and what are the short- and long-term impacts of interventions to strengthen these rights. We often focus only on short-term impacts, not recognizing that interventions that affect asset ownership and control often have effects that unfold over time, and even over generations.

Question: Finally, how do you think the SDGs will impact the issues of women, land and food?

Answer: There is an explicit SDG on gender equality (SDG5), and one of its targets has to do with gender equality in “rights to economic resources, as well as access to ownership and control over land and other forms of property, financial services, inheritance and natural resources, in accordance with national laws.” But some countries still have laws that discriminate against women in terms of property and inheritance rights, and customary practice may still be gender-biased even if statutory law mandates equal rights to own land. Gender inequality is not an issue that is confined to SDG 5, but cuts across the other SDGs, for example, SDG1 on ending poverty, SDG2 on ending hunger, SDG3 on health and well-being, SDG 13 on climate change, etc. Achieving gender equality is a goal in itself, but also helps to attain other development goals.

For the world’s poor, particularly the rural poor, land is their most critical non-labor asset. This important asset needs to be protected and respected by the public and private sectors to reduce vulnerabilities and conflict and promote empowerment and economic growth. This is why the global community’s unanimous endorsement three years ago of the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) was such a milestone. The VGGT recognize that: “The eradication of hunger and poverty, and the sustainable use of the environment, depend in large measure on how people, communities and others gain access to land, fisheries and forests.”

Secure access to and control of land and other valuable natural resources provides women and men, the elderly and youth, indigenous peoples, pastoralists and other vulnerable groups with positive incentives to conserve their lands and to invest to enhance its potential. Secure land rights help to increase agricultural productivity and food security, contributing to more resilient rural economies. More secure rights also reduce costly conflicts – conflicts that take lives, destroy property and constrain economic growth. And with secure rights, communities contribute in important ways to protecting forests and biodiversity – lessening the harmful impacts of global climate change.

This is why it is so important to ensure that a land indicator remain as part of the effort to track progress on SDG 1: Ending Poverty in All Its Forms Everywhere.

Today 75% of the world’s poor live in rural areas where poverty rates are substantially higher (at 29%) than they are in urban areas (13%). Many of these rural poor depend upon agriculture for their livelihoods. Unfortunately, these livelihoods are constrained by poor infrastructure, lack of inputs, weak credit markets and, in many cases, weak land governance. By addressing these constraints and by securing rights to land and natural resources we can make progress in increasing agricultural growth, which we know is particularly effective at reducing poverty As the World Bank notes: “Access to land, water, and human capital critically determine the ability of households to participate in agricultural markets, secure livelihoods in subsistence farming, compete as entrepreneurs in the rural nonfarm economy, and find employment in skilled occupations.”

Given the importance of secure rights to land and natural resources for the world’s poor, we strongly encourage the Inter-Agency and Expert Group on Sustainable Development Indicators to include a robust and measurable land indicator under Goal 1:

Percentage of people with secure tenure rights to land (out of total adult population), with legally recognized documentation and who perceive their rights to land as secure, by sex and by type of tenure.

As USAID knows, land matters for ending poverty.

Dr. Heather Huntington is an Impact Evaluation Specialist on USAID’s Evaluation, Research and Communication project, implemented by The Cloudburst Group. She leads the design and implementation of impact evaluations for land tenure and natural resource management projects in Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia and Zambia. Dr. Huntington is among the authors of the 2015 World Bank Paper: Perceptions of Tenure Security and a presenter at the American Evaluation Association (AEA) Conference discussing impact evaluations testing improvements to land tenure in the context of climate smart agriculture in Zambia, artisanal diamond mining in Guinea and community forestry management in Zambia. As part of our Ask the Expert series, we asked Dr. Huntington to describe some of the processes that go into designing and implementing an impact evaluation for USAID:

Question: Tell us about yourself, what is your professional background?

Answer: I design and implement impact evaluations related to land tenure and natural resource management, service delivery and local governance. I received a PhD in Public Policy and Political Science from the University of Michigan and my dissertation was an impact evaluation of a USAID water demand management project in Southern Kyrgyzstan. After graduate school, I served as a full time Democracy Fellow for USAID’s Center of Excellence on Democracy, Human Rights and Governance, where I continue to have an affiliation. My role in the Center was as an impact evaluation specialist for democracy- and governance-related projects.

Question: Why are impact evaluations significant to USAID’s land tenure work?

Answer: Impact evaluations are an important tool to measure the effectiveness of programs in achieving their desired results. Specifically, they can improve USAID’s programming by refining an intervention to an outcome of interest, such as higher agricultural productivity or lower levels of conflict. Impact evaluations help decision makers identify and address holes in the logic of a program’s design.

In addition, well-designed impact evaluations often involve a large number of household surveys and thus produce a large amount of useful data that can serve multiple purposes. This includes testing the program theory and hypotheses, but also exploring many other research questions in depth.

Question: What are some of the key take-aways from the land tenure impact evaluations you are presenting at the AEA conference?

Answer: One take-away is that it it is important to plan for an impact evaluation at the initial design stage of a program, including conducting a cost-benefit analysis, to help determine the type of impact evaluation the program should use. This is important because rigorous experimental designs require that the program implementation design be written into the fabric of the program design as early as the project’s approval stage. Quasi-experimental impact evaluations are generally the easiest to carry out from implementation standpoint, however,  from a research perspective, these methods have numerous drawbacks and present multiple methodological challenges.

Considerations such as if the impact evaluation includes a community listing, or pre-census, of the study areas under evaluation is often imperative for the sampling design and needs to be factored in at the budgeting and planning stage. Additionally, factors including the preferred data collection method, should be examined. In our experience,  electronic data generally produces higher quality data than paper data collection but requires significant preparation, programming and training for local data collection firms..

Finally, a rigorous impact evaluation requires very close collaboration between the evaluation team,  program implementer and donors. While the evaluation should be led by independent third-party groups, communication and coordination regarding timing, interventions and geographic scope is essential between the evaluation team and implementing partner.

Question: Why is the American Evaluation Association Conference important and why is it significant that USAID’s land tenure impact evaluations are presented at this conference?

Answer: I believe that development partners and researchers will be interested in learning about our data and research products and that other evaluation specialists and firms will be interested in learning about our process and methods. In addition to ‘getting the word out’ about what we are doing and what we have learned, it is helpful for us to know what other work is being done in the field of  land tenure and natural resource evaluation.

Lauren Persha, PhD, is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a Research Advisor at The Cloudburst Group. In her role as an advisor, she provides research and technical guidance on a portfolio of USAID-funded impact evaluations in the land and resource governance sectors – including impact evaluations of land tenure projects in Ethiopia, Zambia, Guinea, and Liberia.

Dr. Persha has been involved in evaluation work in Eastern Zambia since 2014, where she contributes to the design and implementation of a randomized controlled trial impact evaluation of USAID’s Tenure and Global Climate Change project.

SET UP
Conducting rigorous, field-based, mixed qualitative and quantitative methods impact evaluations at scale–as we are currently doing for the impact evaluation of USAID’s Tenure and Global Climate Change project in Zambia–is no easy task. This particular evaluation collects data with smartphones and Open Data Kit to survey 3500 households across 300+ villages, and has enumerator teams conduct focus group discussions and key informant interviews across a range of important village groups. The logistics of an intense rollout of data collection across a large geography, with many survey administrators, in a condensed time frame, can be quite a challenge.

SURVEY INSTRUMENTS
These types of evaluations are built upon a comprehensive set of survey instruments, which must be tailored to local contexts while also allowing for an eventual broader comparability. In addition to being unique, yet generally comparable, these evaluations must also adequately capture information on a range of indicators and potential mechanisms by which households are impacted by project activities over time. Close collaboration between the third-party evaluation team and project implementers is essential, as is the careful timing of the evaluation with the sequencing of project activities.

SURPRISES
Unexpected field challenges are par for the course, so flexibility is key. For example, developing an appropriate sampling frame for the household surveys was a challenge in Zambia, where the evaluation team had only lists of village names to work with because comprehensive information around villages and their locations did not exist. Verifying village information during survey implementation uncovered inevitable discrepancies–such as villages listed under multiple names or located outside the project area–and led to the evaluation team eventually conducting its own full listing of communities in other project areas prior to roll-out.

SWEET SUCCESS
The broader payoff to the development sector in undertaking impact evaluation work is high. The benefits of using rigorous and direct evidence to grow the knowledge base around the impacts by which innovative land tenure programming may achieve its development objectives extend far beyond that of any individual project. Given the current visibility and growing acknowledgement of the role that land tenure issues play on household welfare–as well as potential knock-on effects for governance, land use sustainability, food security, female empowerment, and so on–such evaluations also contribute valuable evidence on how to increase effectiveness of future development programming across a wide range of sectors.

It seems natural to believe that secure property rights affect a farmer’s willingness to make longer-term investments. If farmers do not have secure property rights, they will be less likely to plant and sustain trees, conserve resources or make long term improvements to the soil because their land might be taken away from them before they can reap the benefits of these investments. But does this relationship play out in reality, particularly for the millions of smallholder farmers across the developing world?

This question is important because these types of long-term investments are critical for reducing extreme poverty, improving food security and nutrition, and addressing climate change. Understanding the degree to which property rights affect incentives to invest and conserve is important for policy makers and donors. Which is why USAID is attempting to answer this question in Zambia through a randomized controlled trial – the gold standard of rigorous, scientific impact evaluations.

Agriculture supports the livelihood of over 70% of the population in Zambia, including 78% of women. Relative to other countries in the region, it has an abundance of fertile land, water, and a favorable climate for agricultural production. Yet, despite these favorable conditions, crop yields are well below global averages and 80% of rural Zambians live in extreme poverty.

Improved conservation agriculture and agroforestry practices – such as planting fertilizer trees between crops – would help improve crop yields. However, adoption of these “climate-smart agriculture” practices has been low. In eastern Zambia’s Chipata District, agroforestry tree species were planted on only 6% of fields. One reason why might be that many farmers in Zambia do not have secure land rights. The vast majority of rural Zambians live on customary land without formal documentation of their land rights.

To address this, USAID works with four local chiefs and the Chipata District Land Alliance, a local NGO, to 1) map, demarcate and certify the customary land rights of local farmers and 2) promote sustainable agroforestry practices that facilitate tree planting and survivorship.

To rigorously measure the effectiveness of these approaches, USAID randomly assigned 75 villages to receive the agroforestry extension, 75 villages to receive the land certification program, 75 villages to receive both, and 75 villages to receive neither (the control group). By conducting extensive surveys in these villages over a three-year period, before and after activities take place, the impact evaluation will be able to rigorously measure changes over time. The results will help answer the question of “How do changes in property rights that strengthen a farmer’s perception of long term security over farmland affect a farmer’s decision to practice climate smart agriculture, including agroforestry, on their own farms?”

For USAID – and for the millions of people in the developing world living without secure rights to land and resources – the answer to this question could be an important part of shaping efforts to end extreme poverty, reduce hunger, and address a rapidly changing climate.

Learn more: view a presentation on the baseline findings from this impact evaluation from the American Evaluation Association conference here.

At the October 27, 2015 Women, Land and Food Event there were more questions from our in-person and online audience than we were able to answer. We wanted to address this by answering some of the most interesting questions we received:

Question: What are some initiatives or projects by USAID to address women’s land rights in Africa?

Answer: One example is Rwanda where USAID supports the development of high-quality evidence-based research that examines gender rights in practice. The project helps inform citizens, NGOs and the government on how best to engage women and men to secure women’s land rights; what the barriers are to securing those rights; and policy implications for the country’s land reform efforts.

USAID projects also address women’s land rights in other regions. Some examples of USAID’s work on securing women’s land rights that you might be interested in include Kosovo, Tajikistan and Vietnam.

Question: Do we see the same sorts of returns on investment in tenure for women where livelihoods are pastoralist-based rather than agriculture-based? This is especially interesting because often pastoralist land ownership is communal. How can we overcome the challenges to grant women greater access to formalized partnerships in this type of land ownership scheme?

Answer: This is a very interesting question and an area where donors and civil society may need to dedicate further research. Some existing research that has addressed the challenges women face under pastoralist systems include:

• Fiona Flinton, “Sitting at the table: securing benefits for pastoral women from land tenure reform in Ethiopia”
• Elizabeth Daley, “Securing land rights for women”
• And the Maliasili Initiatives has some interesting work on pastoralist women in Tanzania

Question: Do you see ICT playing any role on LTPR especially for women and marginalized indigenous groups?

Answer: Yes, information and communications technology (ICT) can play an important role in expanding access to land administration services. One example of this is a USAID project that works with Tanzanians to map and record land rights – reducing the time and cost of formalizing rights to land. ICT can help in other ways such as to help improve transparency in the land sector, which reduces problems of corruption. It can also help by crowdsourcing important information about forest boundaries, locations of pastures and migration routes (for pastoralist communities) and help to identify water sources.

Question: Are your programs striving for gender equality or gender equity?

Answer: USAID’s program work to comply with sector-level best practices as well as with the Agency’s Gender Policy – this means that USAID programming should strive to promote gender equality and women’s empowerment. In the land sector, the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests (VGGT) place strong emphasis on importance of gender equality and the need to respects women’s rights to property and housing, which are recognized under the Convention on the Elimination of all Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW) convention and its Optional Protocol.

Question: I was wondering, where did you work in Kenya and what were your experiences dealing with rigid gender norms around land ownership? What strategies did you employ?

Answer: In Kenya, USAID worked with villagers in Ol Posimoru to engage men and women, boys and girls in discussions about the rights that women hold under the 2010 Constitution and the roles and responsibilities of elders to uphold those rights. Male villagers spent time learning about the contributions women make to the well-being of the community and how women and girls would be able to contribute more to their communities and families when tenure rights were more secure. As a result of trainings and community engagement women were elected to serve as elders and now they a part of the local governance institutions. Read more about this project in Kenya.

On October 27, 2015, USAID, Landesa and the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) held a panel event at on Women, Land and Food. This panel event examined the challenges, programming lessons and growing body of evidence demonstrating the profound link between land rights, food security and women’s empowerment.

Panelists included:

• Charles North, Senior Deputy Assistant Administrator, USAID (Moderator)
• Chris Jochnick, CEO, Landesa
• Susan Markham, Senior Coordinator for Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment, USAID
• Lauren Persha, Assistant Professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and Research Advisor at The Cloudburst Group.

You can watch a recording of the entire event, view one-on-one interviews with Susan Markham and Chris Jochnick and explore the photo gallery highlighting international development work involving women, land and food below.

To make sure you receive updates on future events and get up-to-date information on land rights, sign up to receive our newsletter.

Recording:

 

Event Slideshow:

Interviews:

 

 

Guest commentary by Paul Munro-Faure, Deputy Director, Climate, Energy and Tenure Division, FAO, Andrew Hilton and David Palmer, Senior Land Tenure Officers, FAO.

October is a month that is closely linked to food security. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the UN forum for policies concerning food security, holds its 42nd session during October 12-15. At its 38th session in 2012, CFS formally endorsed the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security. These Guidelines were negotiated by governments from all regions of the world with the participation of civil society and the private sector, through the forum of CFS, following a global consultation process led by FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

October 16 commemorates World Food Day, which this year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of FAO. Land tenure, along with many other factors, was linked to the goal of freedom from want of food at a conference in the USA in 1943, which committed to the founding of a permanent organization for food and agriculture. An interim commission then laid the groundwork for FAO, which was based in Washington, D.C., until its headquarters were moved to Rome, Italy in 1951.

On World Food Day this year, the UN Secretary-General and the FAO Director-General will be joined by the President of Italy and the Italian Ministers for Agriculture and Foreign Affairs for the official celebration at Expo Milano. The theme for the international Expo is fitting: “Feeding the planet, energy for life”. The Expo, which opened in May and closes at the end of October, provides a location for confronting the issues of agriculture, sustainable development and the struggle to combat hunger. A number of its events have featured aspects of land tenure, such as the importance of secure tenure rights for women and the dangers of people losing their tenure rights, for example through agricultural investments that lack appropriate safeguards.

The Voluntary Guidelines on tenure have now become the globally-accepted standard for improving the governance of tenure for all, with an emphasis on vulnerable and marginalized people. While the guidelines were prepared in the context in food security, they also contribute to other development goals, including poverty eradication, sustainable livelihoods, women’s tenure rights, social stability, housing security, rural development, environmental protection and sustainable social and economic development.

The guidelines provide a framework that can be used by governments, civil society, private sector, citizens and philanthropic foundations. They are providing guidance to the Global Donor Working Group on Land, where FAO is collaborating with USAID and other bilateral and multilateral members to improve coordination and the sharing of information on efforts to improve the governance of tenure. This working group meets on 16 October, at IFAD in Rome, as part of its regular program of bi-annual meetings to progress its work plan, which includes during the current period supporting four studies on: i) Open data, innovative technology-based solutions for better land governance; ii) Successful models for partnerships between developed and developing/emerging countries for better land governance; iii) The most promising tools for donors to help make good land governance into a corporate performance standard; and iv) Effective approaches to strengthen coherence across donor governments regarding good practice in land governance. The Working Group is also supporting technical meetings on 14 and 15 October to discuss, respectively, the promotion of the Voluntary Guidelines and their integration into donor supported activities and the alignment of the Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) and other assessment tools with VGGT implementation at country level.

The guidelines are now being used by a wide number of organizations, including FAO and USAID, in their own programs.

As a framework for improving tenure and its governance, the guidelines are expected to be the key reference for work on tenure in support of the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were formally adopted by the General Assembly of the UN in New York on 25 September.