Post Type: Article

USAID’s Kenya Justice project – which is implemented by Landesa and works with local communities to raise legal awareness and improve women’s ability to exercise their rights – continues to gain media attention. Last week, two NGOs featured blogs on the Justice project: Landesa Helps Bring About Women’s Rights in Rural Kenya by the ONE campaign and Women’s Property Rights Success in Rural Kenya by the Borgen Project.

Both articles highlighted some of the project’s recent successes in working with customary legal systems to enhance women’s rights such as: requiring a spouse’s written consent before approving property-related transactions; providing women the ability to keep a portion of their land in cases of separation or divorce; and most notably, increasing the number of girls enrolled in secondary school. As we noted in an earlier commentary about preventing child marriage, strengthening women’s land rights empowers them economically. Enabling women to exercise greater control over the income generated from land allows them to earmark resources for education, including school fees for girls.

The One campaign’s blog noted that “gender equality has the potential to end the cycle of poverty by enabling women to contribute to community decisions and govern family resources and money wisely. We here at ONE are excited about the potential for this program to inspire others like it across the African continent and are looking forward to watching communities change and grow as women gain greater rights and freedoms.”

Dr. Gregory Myers, USAID Division Chief, Land Tenure and Property Rights argues that the next steps to make these changes for women’s property rights in Kenya concrete and actionable is to formalize these changes in law and policy.

Near the end of January, Liberian President and Nobel Peace Prize recipient, Ellen Johnson Sirleaf called attention to “the need for major reform of our land and natural resource governance systems” in her annual message to the national legislature. While acknowledging some recent challenges, President Sirleaf stated that the Liberia Government “has taken significant steps, principally through the creation of the Land Commission which is tasked with developing policies, legislation and regulations that ensure equal access to productive land for all Liberians; ensure security of tenure and the rule of law with regard to all land transactions; facilitate the development and implementation of institutional framework, the use and management of land, and promote investment in land and land resources.”

President Sirleaf also announced the formation of a special Women’s Land Rights Task Force, which will assist the Land Commission to develop a structure for gender-equitable land policies. These reform efforts are supported by USAID’s Land Policy and Institutional Support (LPIS) project, which recently held a two-day workshop to help launch the Women’s Land Rights Task Force.

In addition to the LPIS project, USAID has supported the Government of Liberia’s efforts to improve resource governance through the recently-completed Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) project. The PRADD project worked closely with the Government of Liberia and artisanal mining communities to clarify and formalize rights to land and natural resources in order to reduce conflict, promote economic growth, and create incentives for good stewardship of the land.

The project’s recent impact evaluation report noted that “miners having sold significantly more of their diamonds through local licensed brokers than did miners responding to the baseline survey.” Increasing the number of diamonds flowing through formal chains of custody is an important achievement for the PRADD project, which supported Liberia’s efforts to comply with the Kimberley Process Certification Scheme – an international initiative which attempts to prevent the trafficking of conflict diamonds.

This video from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the UN (FAO) profiles a project relating to secure access to land and resource rights in Mozambique. The 19 minute film is narrated mostly in Portuguese with English subtitles.

The documentary focuses on efforts to empower members of rural communities to better understand and exercise their property rights, and promote more gender equitable land and resource governance systems. The project has provided legal training on land matters to over 400 paralegals, who play an important role in informing community members – especially women and other vulnerable populations – about their legal rights and assisting in conflict resolution. According to the project’s Chief Technical Advisor, Marianna Bicchieri, FAO’s project “seeks to promote legal education at a community level so that women can exercise and ensure their rights to land and natural resources, especially in the context of the AIDS pandemic.”

Mozambique is a mostly rural country; many residents are either unaware of their land rights or lack the means to assert those rights effectively. While formal law permits women to independently register land and jointly own marital assets, the reality is that few women have assets in their names. Women who lack secure property rights and who depend primarily on relationships with men for access to land and other natural resources are extremely vulnerable.

In addition to FAO, the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) is also working to establish more efficient and secure access to land and resources in Mozambique. MCC’s Land Tenure Services Project seeks to improve the country’s land policy framework, build institutional capacity in land-related services, and improve access to land by increasing education and awareness of land rights.

Mozambique also announced a cooperation framework to support the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition in September 2012. The New Alliance is “a commitment by G8 members, African countries, and private sector partners to achieve sustained and inclusive agricultural growth to lift 50 million people out of poverty over the next 10 years.”

Click here for more information from USAID on Mozambique.

On December 21st, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution on Agriculture Development and Food Security, which encourages countries to “give due consideration to implementing the Voluntary Guidelines (VGs) on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security.”

In addition to calling on countries to consider adopting the VGs, the resolution also “requests the relevant entities of the United Nations system, in accordance with their respective mandates and in the most cost-effective manner, to ensure the speedy dissemination and promotion of the Guidelines”.

The Voluntary Guidelines were adopted in May 2012 by the UN Committee on World Food Security (CFS) and are an international soft law instrument that outlines principles and practices governments can refer to when making laws and administering land, fisheries and forests rights. The VGs are intended to create a better environment for investments in agriculture, reduce land-related conflicts, recognize the rights of women, promote improved natural resource management and address challenges related to global climate change.

Click here for more information from USAID on the VGs.

A recent article from IRIN news discusses land and conflict, as well as some potential opportunities for land reform, in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). According to the article, “land disputes are key drivers of conflict in eastern DRC, and they hinder development across the region. Some researchers argue that agrarian conflict, rooted in issues of land rights and citizenship, is the principle cause of the Kivu region’s wars.”

International donor agencies have begun working to address land issues in DRC, focusing primarily on mediating land disputes and registering land claims, but progress has been slow. According to the article, mediation projects lack coherence, coordination and sustainability, while assisting the registration of land claims has had limited results.

The DRC, which is faced by weak resource governance, conflict, instability, corruption, and poverty, could benefit greatly from a revised legal framework for land. Increasingly, the DRC government appears willing to address land issues – the article notes that the DRC government and UN Habitat recently worked out a ‘road map’ for reform of the land law and land governance.

This is a case where international donors, government and civil society organizations should consider the Voluntary Guidelines (VGs) for the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries, and Forests in the Context of National Food Security as a means to address land and resource rights. The VGs – which were adopted in May 2012 by the UN Committee on World Food Security – establish principles to guide countries in designing and implementing laws that govern property rights over land, fisheries and forests for agricultural and other uses. The VGs create a favorable architecture for policy reform that can address conflict, gender, access and rights. The VGs could also help to address the overall problem of coordination of reform efforts.

Click here for more information on the VGs.

This research paper from USAID calls attention to the challenges faced by vulnerable populations with respect to land. The paper identifies five vulnerable groups who have weak claims on land rights and are particularly vulnerable to changes in land tenure systems and property rights reform:

• Women
• Households that have been directly affected by HIV/AIDS
• Pastoralist communities
• Indigenous populations
• People who have been displaced during violent conflicts (refugees, IDPs, and demobilized combatants) or who are threatened to be displaced by natural disasters or climate change (climate refugees)

The issues faced by each of these groups differ. Women’s vulnerability, for example, is greater when a country has weak inheritance rights. Gender-biased policies – both customary and statutory – can also deny a woman’s independent claim on land and property. Indigenous populations, on the other hand, often face competing challenges over the rights to valuable natural resources contained within indigenous territories.

Identifying these vulnerable populations and carefully analyzing their unique issues is essential to the development of strategies to strengthen the position of these groups with respect to secure access to land and other natural resources. Because the vulnerability of these groups may be reduced by land tenure and property rights interventions, recognizing them and giving proper consideration to their circumstances and challenges during foreign assistance program design and implementation is critical.

Addressing the issues surrounding vulnerable populations with respect to land should also be an important consideration for policy makers seeking to improve the livelihoods of the poor and reduce their vulnerability to economic shocks.

As the USAID Land Reform Project in Tajikistan comes to a close this month, there has been an increase in publicity for its achievements. An article highlighting a recent event to celebrate the project’s accomplishments and the work of the Tajik government in advancing land reform was featured in local media and a Feed the Future press release. Feed the Future is the U.S. Government’s global hunger and food security initiative. In Tajikistan, as elsewhere, effective land policy and secure land rights are important factors in achieving Feed the Future’s goals of improving food security and reducing hunger and poverty.

According to the article, “in Tajikistan, Feed the Future seeks to address hunger and poverty by accelerating inclusive agricultural growth and improving the nutritional status, particularly of women and children, in 12 districts in the Khatlon region.” The Land Reform Project helps address these issues by providing the Government of Tajikistan with technical assistance and training on developing land legislation and implementing market-based land reforms by facilitating acquisition of land formerly held by state collectives. It also provided training for local government officials, judges and lawyers on land rights issues and developed public outreach and information services focused on strengthening and protecting farmers’ land use rights.

Girls Not Brides, a global partnership of more than 200 Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) committed to ending child marriage, recently featured an article on how women’s land rights can help reduce child marriage. The article describes how USAID’s Kenya Justice project has helped improve girls’ access to education by working with customary justice systems to strengthen women’s land rights in target communities.

Though Kenya’s 2010 constitution expanded women’s rights to own and inherit land, legal reform alone is often insufficient to improve women’s access to land rights in many communities. The Kenya Justice project, which is implemented by USAID’s Seattle-based partner Landesa, works with local communities to raise legal awareness and improve women’s ability to exercise their rights.

By engaging in a dialogue with local traditional authorities to increase understanding of the contributions women make to their community, the Justice project has helped to elevate the status of women. Last year, for the first time, women were elected as tribal elders. In addition to enhancing women’s ability to govern and exercise their rights, strengthening women’s land rights also empowers them economically. According to the article “when women gain joint control over their family’s land, they gain a powerful resource they can use to not only feed their children, but also generate income. And with equal control over those funds, women are earmarking family resources to pay school fees for all their children – girls included.”

According to AllAfrica.com, Liberia’s Inquirer newspaper recently honored Philomena Bloh Sayeh as 2012 Director General of the Year. Ms. Sayeh is the Director General of Liberia’s Center for National Documents and Records Agency (CNDRA) and is a key partner in USAID’s Land Policy and Institutional Support (LPIS) project. This award recognizes the ambitious reform efforts that Ms. Sayeh, with the support of USAID, has overseen at CNDRA during the past year.

According to the article, “Madam Sayeh has worked tirelessly in modernizing land records and recording systems following a 20-year civil conflict in Liberia”. Insecure rights and disputes over land played a major role in Liberia’s internal conflict, which ended in 2003 and Ms. Sayeh’s determined efforts to improve land administration systems are essential to strengthening resource governance and reducing conflict in Liberia.

USAID’s LPIS project has supported Ms. Sayeh’s efforts to modernize CNDRA since 2010. The LPIS project provided assistance to CNDRA in adopting an electronic deed registry software solution that will allow Liberia to digitize land records for the first time ever. The project also supported the rehabilitation of the CNDRA customer service center, which opened on September 17, 2012, and now employs 14 staff members trained in digitizing land records. More than 500 deeds have been scanned and registered in the two months since the center opened, compared with 806 deeds registered in all of 2011.

IFPRI has just published a new paper that considers whether or not policy changes related to gender equality and women’s empowerment in Ethiopia are, or are not, mutually reinforcing. One set of changes involves certification of land use rights at the community level. See here for a discussion of USAID’s project supporting these efforts. Certification allows husbands and wives to be listed as joint holders of the rights (these rights are inheritable by the remaining spouse when the other spouse dies). At approximately the same time, the Family Code in the country was revised to provide for the equal division of marital assets upon divorce. Using a panel dataset and seven collection rounds the paper finds that “the land registration process and the reform of the Family Code may have mutually reinforcing effects on women’s rights and welfare. While this example is obviously rooted in the Ethiopian context, it raises the possibility that similar reform efforts may be complementary in other countries as well.” This suggests that coordinated policy efforts may be particularly helpful at closing the gender asset gap: an important strategy for improving women’s agricultural productivity and the health and nutrition of children.