Post Type: Article

For investors seeking to purchase, lease or access large areas of land in developing countries, understanding the complex land tenure realities – who has what rights or claims to which pieces of land – can be the difference between a failed investment and a successful, responsible one. Failing to account for or adequately compensate individuals or communities with claims to land that is slated for investment can lead to displacements or loss of livelihoods for local people and communities, and can create significant financial or reputational risks for the investor as well. For investors, conducting proper due diligence and structuring responsible land-based investments to account for all stakeholders can be extremely complex in situations where rights to land are unclear, undocumented, overlapping, or poorly enforced – which is often the case in developing countries.

For these reasons, a group of development organizations, under the leadership of Grow Africa and the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, have released a new tool to help investors better understand risks related to land-based investments and manage them responsibly: the Analytical Framework for Investors Under the New Alliance. The Analytical Framework is designed to help investors identify practical steps to align their policies and actions with global best practices and relevant international guidelines, such as the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (also known as the Ruggie Principles), and the African Union’s Guiding Principles on Large-Scale Land Based Investments.

Along with a range of other bilateral and multilateral development partners, USAID played a key role in developing the Analytical Framework through a collaborative multi-stakeholder process. USAID’s Operational Guidelines for Responsible Land-Based Investment form the basis of many of the recommendations in the Analytical Framework.

As a next step, Grow Africa is seeking interested companies to pilot the framework in actual investments projects in Africa to determine their effectiveness. Please contact Grow Africa at info@growafrica.com if your firm is interested in participating in this pilot.

By Heath Cosgrove, Director, USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management Office.

Land tenure and property rights are at the heart of our most pressing development issues. Globally, there are more than 500 land governance programs in approximately 100 countries that recognize land rights as foundational for development work. These programs are expected to increase in the coming years because a growing body of evidence demonstrates that more secure rights to land and resources have powerful impacts on ending extreme poverty, promoting women’s empowerment, improving food security, reducing conflict, protecting biodiversity and responding to climate change. For development practitioners, better understanding and incorporating land tenure into existing and future development programming is crucial to achieving our objectives across a variety of sectors, such as agriculture, democracy and governance, environment, urban development, economic growth and disaster risk resilience.

To improve understanding of this critical issue, USAID is announcing the launch of the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on land tenure and property rights. This free course is open to the public and provides a 14-week introduction to land tenure and property rights and their critical role in international development work.

Starting September 14 and running until the end of 2015, the MOOC features lectures from leading researchers and practitioners – including experts from Yale University, Michigan State University, the International Organization for Migration, USAID, and others – presenting theories, evidence and best practices related to property rights in real-world settings. The course also examines case studies in Colombia, Haiti and Tanzania. Participants in the course will receive a certificate upon completion.

The MOOC was developed by USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management Office to help promote effective, accessible, and responsive land governance systems for all members of society. USAID developed this course because when it comes to understanding the myriad complex challenges created by insecure land rights–and the evidenced-based global best practices for addressing them–there has not been a shared education tool to guide development practitioners at the programmatic level until now.

Land tenure and secure property rights can be challenging issues for development practitioners across various sectors to understand and address because throughout much of the developing world rights to land and other resources are often unclear and poorly enforced. Importantly, up to 70% of land in the developing world is unregistered. In many countries, these rights are governed by complex and overlapping systems of formal laws and informal customs.

Better understanding of these systems and their implications on economic growth, food security, women’s empowerment and natural resource management can improve development programming across a range of important topics. Secure property rights change how people interact with other people and with land itself. These rights can be the tipping point as to whether farmers are willing to adopt costly multi-year agriculture programs. The ability for women to inherit and own property can be the gateway to greater gender equality. Land issues have played a major role in 27 conflicts in Africa since 1990 and have been recognized by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as international priorities. USAID’s new Land Tenure and Property Rights MOOC provides a valuable tool to understand these linkages and to improve development outcomes. I encourage you to join us and learn about this key development topic.

From securing women’s inheritance rights, to enabling more responsible agricultural investment, to making cities more resilient to disasters—a growing body of evidence indicates that the systems that govern land and property rights have a significant impact on a wide range of critical development issues. Land tenure and property rights are particularly important to vulnerable groups such as women, indigenous peoples, refugees, internally displaced peoples, and the poor. But one vulnerable group has received less attention when it comes to land rights: youth.

Available evidence suggests that youth face significant and unique challenges when it comes to land and property. In many countries, rising pressures on land have left youth increasingly landless or holding only informal or secondary rights to land. This can lead to higher instances of conflict. In Ethiopia, for example, youth are more likely to experience land-related conflict than the general population. A lack of youth access to land may be a contributing factor to the civil wars in both Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Additionally, it should be noted that definitions of ‘youth’ vary widely across countries and can include individuals up to 35 years of age – in some countries the transition to adulthood requires marriage and children.

Recent research is building evidence of the impact of land tenure and property rights on youth. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has pointed out that landlessness among rural youth is one of the primary causes of migration to urban areas as young people seek out alternative sources of income. New research from USAID has begun to examine the impact of perceptions of land tenure security on youth and other vulnerable populations in Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia and Zambia.

While more research is needed, initial findings indicate that policy makers and development practitioners engaged in land programming should take note of the unique challenges faced by youth. Policies and programs should take steps to promote youth land access and ensure that policies do not disadvantage youth with respect to land.

Download the full paper research paper from USAID.

Guest commentary by Cynthia Caron, PhD. Dr. Caron is a Land Tenure and Gender Specialist with The Cloudburst Group and an Assistant Professor of International Development and Social Change at Clark University.

On April 25, a 7.8 magnitude earthquake struck Nepal, marking the worst natural disaster to strike the country since 1934. Two and a half weeks later, while the nation was trying to recover, an aftershock with a magnitude of 7.3 hit. Families in Nepal continue to grieve lost loved ones and are reliant on the Government of Nepal, relatives, friends, humanitarian agencies and donors to start rebuilding lives and livelihoods. The earthquake affected eight million people in 39 of Nepal’s 75 districts and destroyed or damaged over 760,000 homes. Drawing from recent research on land tenure and disasters, there are two key points development actors should consider as they move into supporting longer term reconstruction and development efforts in the earthquake-affected districts.

Emergency Shelter: With the monsoon season starting this month, immediate shelter is a priority. As of June 3rd there were 394 sites hosting over 41,000 internally-displaced persons. Emergency or transitional shelter might be established in large camp settings, by placing displaced families with host families, or following debris removal, families might build emergency shelter on their own plots of land. Agencies engaged in camp management or looking after displaced families must be attentive to issues such as the length of time that displaced families might stay on a piece of land owned privately by another individual. In the case of a family taking in and ‘hosting’ a displaced family, a clear understanding of how pressure on resources – such as food growing in the garden or drinking water from the host family’s well, toilets or kitchens – can create tensions should be considered. This will help clarify conditions regarding access to and use of the land and resources and avoid or minimize additional displacements or future conflict.

Community-Driven Enumeration: In order to obtain a nuanced understanding of who was considered to own what land, who occupied particular plots, and what tenancy arrangements existed prior to the earthquake, development actors engaged in shelter and settlements programming should consider funding enumeration activities that facilitate cooperation at the lowest administrative levels. This might include bringing local government officials into horizontal alliances with each other and local NGOs .

Enumeration exercises help identify the complex range of tenure arrangements that are specific to the contexts of the affected districts, which standardized tools might not capture, and in doing so address the antecedents of potential land and housing conflicts and allow for a smooth path to restitution, resettlement, and reconstruction. For example, as housing damage assessments continue, data collection should move beyond the initial two main categories of “government houses and private houses” to capture other informal tenure arrangements existing within these two categories, including various relationships between landowners and tenants, as well as the land and resource rights of women and minority groups who may be particularly vulnerable to loss of these rights after the earthquake.

A robust and diverse housing compensation and reconstruction program will take into account not only a wide range of tenure arrangements, but also different family structures. For example, many rural Nepali families continue to live in joint, extended families not nuclear ones. Therefore, the design of compensation and reconstruction packages should take into consideration the various definitions of what constituted a ‘family’ prior to the earthquake. Policymakers and humanitarian agencies must speak with and listen to organizations on the ground and design policies and assistance packages that reflect the plethora of existing tenure arrangements. This includes recognizing the existence and needs of leaseholders, the landless and others who rely on commonly-held property, as well as property owners without formal documentation, but nonetheless longstanding tenancy arrangements. Attention to such detail can mitigate future conflict within and between families and enhance the rebuilding process.

For more information on building more resilient communities both pre-disaster and during the different phases of post-disaster programming, including relief, recovery, and reconstruction, see the USAID Issue Brief: Land Tenure and Disasters.

June 1st marks International Children’s Day, a global celebration of children and an opportunity to bring special attention to how secure land tenure positively affects children. Evidence from a number of countries suggests that when women have secure rights to land and other assets their children and their communities also benefit. For example, in countries where women have weak land rights the level of childhood malnutrition is, on average, 60 percent higher compared with countries where those rights are strong. Research also shows that when mothers have more secure rights to land their children stay in school longer. Other studies show that when women hold more secure rights to land they are better able to provide their children with needed healthcare.

These positive outcomes spread through a society:  for each additional year that a child stays in school his wages rise by 10% (more for girls) and children who are better nourished are better able to learn. Educated girls have children later in their life leading to lower rates of childhood pregnancy, which can have potentially serious health consequences.

Securing land rights is an important contributing factor to improving household food security, expanding educational opportunities for children and improving children’s access to healthcare. This means that for children, as well as for their parents, land matters. USAID is working in 24 countries around the world to clarify and strengthen land rights for all members of society, especially women.