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The Kenya SECURE Project efforts were bolstered recently by two news articles which appeared in the Kenya national newspaper, The Daily Nation. The articles underscored the attempted expropriation of land that had previously been gazetted for two national reserves for conservation purposes.
Kenya Wildlife Service Defends Reserves from Expropriation

One of the SECURE Project’s principal partners, the Kenya Wildlife Service, defended the reserves, and warned investors that the land is not for sale and that any development of tourist infrastructure such as hotels and lodges could only take place through legal lease agreements with KWS. The SECURE Project is assisting KWS protect the rich biodiversity of the Lamu Region by working with communities towards co-management agreements and assisting the Ministry of Lands to address the longstanding issue of land tenure insecurity in the region. The articles highlight the efforts of KWS, through SECURE, to ward off land speculators in the Dodori National Reserve and the Kiunga Marine National Reserve.

How a little-known U.S. program is helping two African nations meet their KP requirements.

Original Source

While it is no secret that the U.S. is a staunch supporter of the Kimberley Process (KP), few know just how deep its support runs. Four years after the U.S. passed the Clean Diamond Trade Act and helped create the Kimberley Process, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) sent an assessment team to the Central African Republic (CAR) to investigate ways in which it could help the country better comply with the KP objectives. The assessment resulted in the creation of the Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development (PRADD) program, a joint USAID and U.S. State Department initiative launched in CAR in 2007 and in Liberia in May of 2010. “It was a pilot approach to try and clarify ownership rights,” said a USAID official close to the project. The creation of PRADD, explained the USAID official, was mainly to address the issue of “miners not having secure rights to the land they were mining on, and not properly recording their activities.” The project has two main goals: “First, we want to increase the amount of diamonds entering the legal chain of custody to comply with the KP, and second, we want to improve livelihoods of artisanal diamond communities.”

To achieve these goals, PRADD educates miners on the diamond industry, strengthens their ability to value their stones, trains them in other sustainable economic activities and works with governments to clarify and formalize property rights and related mining activities. The program runs on a U.S.–funded budget of $2.5 million, split roughly between CAR and Liberia, and is implemented by Tetra Tech ARD, a Burlington, Vermont–based environmental engineering and consulting firm.

CAR Successes
While it is too early to gauge PRADD’s effectiveness in Liberia, the program has made a lot of headway in CAR since its founding in 2007. In that country, according to USAID, PRADD has helped 1,525 artisanal diamond miners secure their property claims with the help of community validation and GPS mapping in the two diamond-producing provinces of Lobaye and Sangha-Mbaere.

PRADD has also geo-referenced 1,866 mining sites, and plans to transfer its database of these sites to the country’s Ministry of Mines, Energy, and Hydrology (MMEH), while training its staff in IT tracking techniques. USAID claims that these property right improvements have almost entirely eradicated land disputes in the project areas, which were at a high of 142 when the program started in 2007.

PRADD’s relationship with the CAR government is also strengthening, and has led to the government following some of the program’s advice, like lowering its 2011 artisanal mining licensing fee by 36 percent. More and more miners are also obtaining licenses. According to USAID, in the Province of Lobaye, the proportion of miners bearing an official license has increased from 5.1 percent in 2009 to 9.7 percent in 2010.

All of this bodes well for the government’s coffers. According to the Regional Directorate’s official figures, legal diamond production doubled by carat weight since 2007, rising from 4.1 percent to 8 percent, which translated into an extra $45,200 in export tax revenue for the CAR national treasury.

Community Outreach
The project’s main successes, however, are at the community level, where it helps foster economic diversification. “There have to be economic activities to rely on other than diamond mining, primarily because diamond mining is too much of a boom-and-bust industry,” observed the USAID official.

Since its start in CAR, PRADD has created 194 local associations that participate in a wealth of economic activities, including some targeted toward women, like soap making and tropical plant grinding. One of the most successful community development initiatives, continued the USAID official, was “to introduce miners to fish farming, so they can convert their mine pits into an alternative source of income.” By March 2011, of 193 reclaimed, exhausted diamond mines in the project areas, 102 had been converted into fish farms, while 91 were turned into fruit tree plots and vegetable gardens. The project has also had success in its public relations push to educate and inform the CAR public about responsible and sustainable mining. Since 2007, PRADD has launched 374 programs on artisanal mining in print and broadcast media throughout the country, and has spearheaded a national public awareness campaign tying the protection of the environment to increased income. According to a USAID project survey, the campaign has led more than 80 percent of miners to pledge to rehabilitate their exhausted mining sites.

Rough Road to Success
All of these successes have come with their fair share of challenges, especially in the early stages of the project. “Initially, building trust with the communities we were working in was very difficult — there was a lot of skepticism when we started four years ago. But when you work with these communities on a regular basis, you can build trust,” the USAID official said, adding “now they are very supportive of the program, and even the government itself has adopted the PRADD methodology.”

Gaining access to and overseeing mining sites was also particularly difficult in a region that has poor infrastructure and mobile communities. “These mining sites are in very remote areas — one site in CAR is a ten-hour drive from the capital on dirt roads,” recalled the U.S. official. “Additionally, artisanal mining communities are very migrant in nature, so sometimes you start working with some miners and then they move out of the community.”

Diamond Valuation
The PRADD program in CAR intensified its efforts to improve miners’ ability to valuate diamonds by building five diamond valuation workrooms in the country in early 2011. PRADD will transfer the workrooms over to local communities in October 2011 after a joint evaluation with CAR’s MMEH.

While these diamond valuation rooms are to be run by locals, they will follow the rules and structures developed by PRADD and the MMEH, including being run by a democratically elected diamond valuation board, with up to 12 members, which must include a treasurer, vice president, president and two trained diamond valuators.

PRADD and CAR’s MMEH also make members take an “Oath of Use,” whereby if they break certain rules, such as selling to unlicensed collectors, raising valuation fees or taking the valuation kit out of the workroom, they will lose all access to the equipment. Though the cost of these workrooms and equipment is relatively low for PRADD — around $5,000 each — the program takes the upkeep of these rooms very seriously. As the USAID official put it, “When we improve their knowledge and ability to valuate and prospect for diamonds, we in turn improve diamond production capability, and increase income to their community.”

Future Efforts
“Since 2007, PRADD has demonstrated its success and has reduced conflict in the areas where people were not investing in the property,” noted the USAID official, adding that while the program is focused on its efforts in CAR and Liberia, it is also looking to eventually expand to other diamond-producing countries in Africa, especially if the popularity of the program catches on and additional program funds can be made available. “We’ve been exploring partnerships with various foundations and companies, but at this point, we don’t have any signed agreements or commitments.”

Article from the Rapaport Magazine – August 2011.

Related Video:
Video: Rapaport Fair Trade Diamond, Jewelry Panel Discussion

Blog Entry in DipNote: The official US State Department Blog Site: The true impact and power of a Department of State-supported USAID program in place there since 2007, evidenced in the form of a “for sale” sign.

In my role as the U.S. working-level focal point to the Kimberley Process — the international grouping designed to prevent rebel groups or their allies from selling diamonds to fuel their conflicts (“conflict diamonds”) — I have become all too familiar with the popular arguments about what this Process, known as the “KP,” cannot do. Some say it cannot, for instance, “deal with” Zimbabwe. Others contend it cannot put an end to smuggling and cannot affirm that the diamond you buy in a store is entirely “clean.”

Given that backdrop, the last thing I expected to see on my recent trip to the Central African Republic (CAR) was the true impact and power of a Department of State-supported USAID program in place there since 2007, evidenced in the form of a “for sale” sign.

Let me explain. This program, called PRADD (Property Rights and Artisanal Diamond Development), focuses on clarifying and securing the land tenure/property rights of individual miners as a means of making artisanal mining a meaningful economic activity, independent of pernicious relationships with traders further up the chain. As a result, more diamonds are brought into the legal chain of custody, and miners’ livelihoods are secured and strengthened. To date, more than 2,000 mining claims in CAR have been mapped and publicly validated, and had property rights certificates delivered, through PRADD — meaning the CAR government recognizes miners’ property rights where none existed before.

The impact of this reform-facilitating project in CAR is enormous, particularly in the power it gives back to the miners and local communities. In fact, PRADD has been so successful that the CAR government now plans to adopt and implement the program by itself. As such, it demonstrates the impact of the mission of the KP worldwide — to ensure that the entire rough diamond supply chain is formalized and accordingly “ring-fenced” so that conflict diamonds cannot penetrate the system.

Now to the “for sale” sign. While driving through the remote village of Bossui in southwest CAR, I noted a sign posted by a local miner looking to sell or rent his mining site. While it may seem banal to us, this is almost revolutionary in an artisanal diamond mining area, since it is only possible because the rights to the site have been formally negotiated and boundaries demarcated with local community and government stakeholders. In addition to active mining sites like this one changing hands, mined-out sites are being sold so they can be used for alternative livelihood efforts (e.g., fish ponds and fruit orchards) that PRADD is facilitating. Previously, miners could much more easily have been evicted with no notice (often violently), and former mining sites could have rotted away as environmentally degraded areas with no economic potential; however, now real value is being created that goes directly to individuals and their communities.

To me, this is the essence of what the KP and PRADD are all about. The KP’s primary requirement is that a country has “internal controls” to track diamonds from production to export. In too many places, however, this is not happening because socio-economic factors are not sufficient to allow a miner to sell into the formal system. But through a program like PRADD, which provides time and assistance to governments to strengthen their internal controls, and empowers vulnerable communities to become secure enough to buy and sell their mining rights, the KP can make a significant step towards eventually ending the trade in conflict diamonds — and possibly do much more.

That is something we can all be proud to be a part of.

Related Content: You can view photos from Special Advisor Brooks-Rubin’s trip to Central Africa Republic here.

On Thursday, April 21st, USAID and the MCC co-hosted a Side Event to the World Bank’s Annual Conference on Land and Poverty entitled “Roundtable Discussion on Land Access and Responsible Agribusiness Investment.”

On Thursday, April 21st, USAID and the MCC co-hosted a Side Event to the World Bank’s Annual Conference on Land and Poverty entitled “Roundtable Discussion on Land Access and Responsible Agribusiness Investment.” The event’s goal was to bring together stakeholders who often talk past each other (and, in some cases, view each other with suspicion) to interact with, and learn from, each other. USAID is actively engaging with these stakeholders in order to identify and develop strategies for agri-business investments that will leverage and complement Feed the Future goals, particularly the goals of empowering smallholder farmers and women.

• Event Details
• Participants List
• Roundtable Minutes

In December 2009, Kenya adopted a new National Land Policy with the purpose of resolving the myriad of land tenure problems throughout the country. The policy calls for the recognition of customary community lands and land governance, addressing inequitable land distribution rooted in historical injustices, instituting a transparent and accountable system of land administration, and ensuring the effective protection of women’s rights to land and related resources, including the provision for joint spousal registration and documentation of land rights. Along with the new Constitution that Kenya adopted in August 2010, which includes a Bill of Rights for its citizens, the National Land Policy, if implemented in its full intent, will represent a significant change towards equitable access to land, sustainable land use, and secure land rights. The news stories from Kenyan national newspapers below provide additional information.

News stories on women’s land rights in Kenya:

• The Daily Nation Kenya
• The Standard for Fairness and Justice, Kenya

Kenya SECURE’s Team Leader, Kevin Doyle, presented at Kenya’s International Conference on Biodiversity, Land Use and Climate Change, held September 15-17, 2010 at the Intercontinental Hotel in Nairobi. Sponsors of the conference included KWS, IUCN, UNEP, EAWLS, and many others.

Mr. Doyle’s presentation gave a brief overview of the Kenya SECURE Project and highlighted some of the key features of the new National Land Policy and the Constitution as they related to community land rights. He then gave a case study overview of the Boni people living in the Boni-Lungi forest.

The visit of five MPs to PRADD-supported mining villages of Sangha-Mbaere in the Central African Republic (CAR) from September 27 to 30, 2010 was a success beyond expectations.

The Rapporteur of the Natural Resource Committee declared on national media that the license fee should be reduced and that the Minister of Mines will be asked to appear before the Commission to that end. The Rapporteur of the Finance Committee ensured that the Committee will work on propositions of reform with the Ministry of Finances. All of them declared publicly that PRADD trainings on diamond evaluation should be broadened, and members of the Gender Committee and Natural Resources Committee proposed that a reduced fee be applied to vulnerable categories of miners such as widows and indigenous peoples (i.e. pygmies). Concrete innovative propositions were made to PRADD in order to boost the creation of cooperatives and link them to state-supported buying houses. All participants warmly greeted PRADD for this “politically ingenious initiative” six months before the parliamentary elections, and agreed to remain focused on the matter and to circulate PRADD reports in the Parliament on a regular basis. The population itself was overly enthusiastic at what was described as “the first visit of a parliamentary delegation to remote villages since the 1960 independence”. The event hit the news with an unexpected success too. Meanwhile, the autumn parliamentary session opened on Friday, October 1, 2010.