Secure land rights for women are a crucial part of a USAID gender responsive strategy to strengthen land tenure, and is making an impact on promoting gender equality and protecting one’s patrimony.
Tumaco, whose population is overwhelmingly Afro-Colombian, is one of Colombia’s most dangerous areas with high levels of gender-based violence (GBV). Due to a complex web of narco mafia groups in its territory and deep-seated, toxic gender norms, Tumaco is often the municipality with the highest number of crimes against sexual integrity, many of which target young women, according to Colombia’s Victims’ Registry.
Before the onset of the pandemic, GBV—including crimes of rape and sexual abuse—was on the rise in the department of Nariño, where Tumaco is located. And then in 2020 the number of cases dropped sharply, but so did the government services to assist victims.
In 2021, the number of GBV cases in Nariño again increased by 51% compared to 2020, reaching more than 2,000 cases in one year, according to Colombian human rights advocate, Fundapaz. Tumaco registered 260 cases, or 13% of the total.
The Secretary of Women’s Affairs was created in January 2021 to take gender-based violence head on, and represents a bold step put forward by Tumaco’s first woman mayor. Patricia Castro’s job as the Secretary leader is to move women’s initiatives into the forefront.
In reality, the Secretary is helping to do the work of the Mesa de la Mujer, or Women’s Committee, which is a Tumaco-based victim’s advocate group that has worked over 10 years to raise awareness around gender equality and promote Afro-Colombian culture.
Gender violence in the context of an ongoing conflict causes widespread damage to women in a number of ways. Fear and intimidation reduce access to government services, including education and healthcare, and chronic violence weakens family relationships, disconnecting people from their cultural traditions.
GBV is also used as a tool for displacement and disproportionately affects Afro-Colombian and indigenous communities. In Colombia, an estimated 40% of women have experienced some form of gender-based violence. Since the 2016 Peace Accords, thousands of rural and urban families in Tumaco have been forced to leave their homes. Studies show that displaced women are at higher risks of abuse by their partners, and the risk for violence is compounded by the inability to escape situations of displacement.
Secure land rights for women are a crucial part of a gender responsive strategy to strengthen land tenure, and can have an outstanding impact on promoting gender equality and protecting one’s patrimony. When women have access to land and property, studies show they are more likely to earn higher incomes, enjoy increased decision-making power, and feel more protected in marital conflicts.
Land Rights are Women’s Rights
In Tumaco, the USAID Land for Prosperity Activity works closely with the municipal government to streamline gender equality and social inclusion in local land policies and activities. The USAID-supported Municipal Land Office developed an articulated gender and land titling strategy to target women-headed households in urban settings. Every month, small teams of land experts visit neighborhoods around Tumaco to explain the benefits of land titling and the rights of the women who live there.
“Thanks to USAID, housing is one of the main pillars of the Secretary of Women’s Affairs’ mandate.” – Patricia Castro, Tumaco’s Women’s Affairs Secretary
Since 2020, the Tumaco Municipal Land Office has delivered 137 land titles. Of the total, approximately 75%, or 101 land titles, are either women-headed households or joint-titled with a spouse.
“We are motivating our women to participate in land formalization workshops that are visiting their neighborhoods. Many women have the same questions about what happens if they separate from their husbands. The best way to share this information is through the workshops,” explains Patricia Castro, the Women’s Affairs Secretary.
Over the last two years, dozens of municipalities throughout Colombia have adopted effective strategies, such as Municipal Land Offices, that advance gender equality and social inclusion. In matters related to land formalization and restitution, USAID and local leaders are implementing training for staff, sub-contractors, and residents.
USAID-supported municipal land offices across Colombia have delivered approximately 800 land titles since 2020, and over 600 of those land titles are in the name of women-headed households or joint titles.
USAID supports women leaders towards gender equality and women’s empowerment in land tenure, resource governance, and agroforestry value chains
By: Sarah Lowery, USAID LRG/DDI and Corinne Hart, USAID GenDev/DDI
In many countries men control who gets to use, own, and make decisions about land.
“We used to stay in a corner, quiet. If someone came to take our land or exploit our forests, we did not have the courage to try to stop them.” These words from a woman in Mecoburi, Mozambique reflect how women across the world often feel powerless to defend their rights to land and natural resources. For rural communities, land means everything, from the ability to produce crops for food and income to leveraging financial assets.
Although women play critical roles in agriculture and food production, they are less likely to access agricultural inputs and other productive resources and have fewer opportunities to engage in commercial agroforestry value chains. Even when laws and policy provide for gender equality, women face many other barriers to secure land rights, including weak implementation, gender norms that prevent women from owning property, unequal inheritance practices, limited knowledge about their land rights, time constraints to participate in land registration and governance activities, and increased vulnerability to gender-based violence.
Empowering women in land and natural resources
Since 2018, the USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program has been implementing innovative and ambitious partnerships with communities, governments, traditional leaders, civil society organizations, and the private sector to promote gender equality and women’s economic empowerment by improving land tenure, resource governance, and making agroforestry value chains more inclusive across six countries. The program has impacted the lives of over 143,000 women who have benefited from documented land rights, participation in land and natural resource governance, and access to related benefits such as credit, agricultural extension, and livelihoods opportunities. Across Ghana, India, Liberia, Malawi, Mozambique, and Zambia, USAID supports the adoption of laws and policies that strengthen women’s land rights; ensures women’s participation in systematic land documentation processes; increases women’s participation in value chains; promotes changes in discriminatory gender norms; and minimizes risk of gender-based violence. In each of these countries, women have overcome harmful gender biases, stereotypes, and discrimination and are leading their communities toward more inclusive, environmentally sustainable land and natural resource management that brings economic benefits to all.
Meet the Groundbreakers
Patricia Geh (third from right) with the other elected members of the Zor Yolowee community land development and management committee. As vice-president of the committee, she is leading decision-making on how land and other resources are managed in her community. Photo credit: Green Advocates International.
In Liberia, community land development and management committees are responsible for making decisions about the administration and use of customary land. In five communities surrounding the Blei Community Forest, USAID is raising awareness about customary land tenure rights. The project uses gender-balanced facilitation teams to teach the importance of women’s participation in the committees and provides women with technical knowledge on land governance. In the pilot communities, today women account for 43 percent of committee members, and many have been nominated to serve in leadership positions. Patricia Geh was elected vice-president of the Zor Yolowee Committee in a region with important forest resources, which are managed by the community. Because of this work, she explained, women now understand their rights and are actively participating in meetings, making decisions alongside men and elders. Patricia feels confident that she can help lead the community to use the resources in a sustainable way, saying, “We will ‘use some and keep some,’ so the future generations can enjoy them too.”
Deribe Kanjauke was elected a member of her village’s customary land committee in Malawi and will lead land governance in the community during the systematic land documentation process supported by USAID. Photo credit: Vincent Moses/ILRG.
Similarly, customary land committees are responsible for documenting and administering land in Malawi. Despite laws that ensure women’s representation in the committees, many women have little to no information about their land rights, including their right to run for leadership positions. USAID is working with the Ministry of Lands in Malawi to document customary land in the Traditional Area of Mwansambo in Nkhotakota district and raise awareness about the importance of women’s participation in the documentation process, which aims to benefit at least 10,000 people by 2023. Deribe Kanjauke says that because of USAID’s gender equality efforts in her community, she is eager to actively participate and lead land governance initiatives in her community. Although at first people doubted that women could fulfill this important role, she was determined to overcome this barrier and represent women’s voices. Now elected to her village committee, Deribe said, “I want to see that the land documentation process goes according to the law, the way it is supposed to be. I want to make sure that women are not discriminated against or get their land grabbed and that when parents die, neither boys nor girls lose their land.”
After attending USAID-funded training on women’s leadership and empowerment, Community Liaison Assistant Nancy Mutemba increased her community outreach to increase women’s participation in natural resource management in Zambia. Photo: Muswema Chanda.
In Zambia, USAID is working with 16 governmental and non-governmental organizations to increase awareness about women’s role in the sustainable and transparent management of natural resources that are critical to the livelihoods of rural communities. Nancy Mutemba, 26, works as a Community Liaison Assistant with USAID partner Frankfurt Zoological Society. She received USAID-funded training on women’s leadership and empowerment in natural resource governance, and explained that the training opened her eyes about her own abilities and the prevalence of deep-rooted gender norms that prevent most women in her community from controlling critical resources. “I understood that poverty was so real because our important resources and sources of income were being mismanaged and women had no say nor benefit. I decided to start including messages on women’s participation in decision-making at household and community levels during my community facilitation work.” Working with community facilitators like Nancy, USAID has helped increase women’s participation in wildlife law enforcement and in community governance. In Mukungule Chiefdom, where Nancy works, women’s representation in community resource boards increased from 25 percent in 2016 to 62 percent in 2020.
Sujata Pramanick is a smallholder farmer and community agronomist in West Bengal, India, where she is leading other women and farming families in the PepsiCo potato supply chain to adopt sustainable farming practices that increase their productivity while conserving soil health and reducing greenhouse gas emissions. Photo credit: Subarna Maitra/ILRG
Secure land tenure is pivotal for rural women’s economic empowerment, leading to greater influence in household decision-making and the ability to enter and benefit from commercial value chains. In India, USAID is partnering with PepsiCo to increase women’s participation in PepsiCo’s supply chains. Since 2019, over 1,000 women have benefitted from training to learn the technical skills needed to enter the PepsiCo potato supply chain. In addition, these women farmers are guiding their farming families and communities to adopt sustainable farming practices that both increase productivity and meet climate change mitigation and adaptation goals. Sujata Pramanick is a 34-year-old potato farmer and women’s group leader from Barasat in West Bengal. Although she manages all activities on the family’s small farm that supplies potatoes to PepsiCo, only her husband’s name is listed on their land title and therefore his is the only name included on PepsiCo’s suppliers’ list. Over the past two years, however, Sujata attended several trainings on women’s empowerment and agricultural practices and was selected as a part-time Community Agronomist, responsible for disseminating information and supporting other farmers in her village. Receiving targeted technical knowledge for the first time enabled her to increase production on her family farm and encourage others to wear protective equipment and manage waste responsibly, so farmers and the environment are healthier. She feels valued not only in the community, but also in her household: she now actively participates in decision-making about household investments and expenditures, and this year Sujata’s husband asked PepsiCo to list her name as the PepsiCo supplier.
Odete Pereira with the women from the producers’ club she leads in Zambezia, Mozambique. With USAID support, over 1,300 smallholder farmers received long term use rights of land belonging to Grupo Madal and are now able to produce crops for subsistence and for sale to Madal and other companies. Photo credit: Thais Bessa/ILRG.
USAID is working with private sector partner Grupo Madal in Mozambique to solve potential land conflicts with communities in ways that benefit both smallholder farmers and the company. Due to scarce arable land and a growing population, farmers have encroached upon Madal’s lands for subsistence farming, creating conflict not only with Madal, but between farming families. Rather than evicting them, Madal worked with USAID to create a program that allows 1,300 farmers – 85 percent of whom are women – to secure long term use rights to the land. With these rights, the farmers can grow crops to feed their families and for profit in partnership with Madal. Odete Pereira, a 54-year-old mother of six, is one of the farmers working with Madal under this new program. She was recently elected president of her local producers’ club, a group of 20 women who work together to organize their production and engagement with the company and other potential buyers. The delimitation of land for smallholders under the USAID-Madal partnership decreased conflict between communities and the company and within communities. Farmers feel safer and more confident to use the land and engage in commercial value chains that can significantly improve their income-earning potential. USAID also supported trainings for the newly formed producers’ clubs, including a 12-week women’s empowerment and leadership training. Odete said the trainings changed how women see themselves and taught them to understand and recognize gender norms within their households. “I never knew women were allowed to participate in decisions with men. I saw a difference in my relationship with my husband. He realized I deserve respect. He used to go out and leave me with all the housework. Now he is back home when I need to attend training or meetings. Before, if we earned 100 meticais [USD 1.50] he said it was all his, even though I was the one who worked the land. Now we plan things together, and we know we need to save 20 meticais to make repairs in our house and spend 80 to buy food and school uniforms for the children,” she said.
Women like Patricia, Delibe, Nancy, Sujata, and Odete are paving the way toward equal land and natural resource rights, leading to social, economic, and environmental benefits for their families, communities, and other stakeholders. With greater participation by women in land and natural resource governance, women and their families are able to access a wider variety of income opportunities and overcome traditional barriers that prevent women from having equal rights to land. In addition, expanding leadership opportunities for women in land and natural resource governance gives women greater recognition and stature in their households and communities, which can lead to more responsible and equitable household expenditures, greater food security, more sustainable management of natural resources, and increased adoption of farming practices that mitigate climate change risks.
USAID is working to build the capacity of women leaders in developing countries by strengthening women’s land and resource rights, helping women run for elected bodies, and training them to meaningfully contribute to community governance. Increasing rural women’s access to land and natural resources is a core element in advancing gender equality, as land is the main asset of the rural poor. This International Women’s Day, USAID invites other organizations working towards gender equality to join them in advocating for women’s land and resource rights in developing countries, to help equip and empower the women leaders in other communities to be agents of change.
Balancing successful wildlife protection and expanding human populations leads to reduced human-wildlife conflict in Zambia’s North Luangwa Ecosystem
As the global community wakes up to the deepening biodiversity crisis, many of Africa’s wild spaces are under threat, not from guns and poachers, but from the shovels and agricultural fields of smallholder farmers trying to make a living. While a family growing corn or cotton may seem less ominous than a man holding a gun and poached ivory, the negative impact on wildlife can be equally devastating.
Each year, rural communities broaden their search for increasingly-scarce arable land and encroach on wildlife habitat. While this move makes sense from the farmer’s standpoint, this expansion intensifies human-wildlife conflict, often resulting in deadly human-animal confrontation, crop destruction, and attacks on livestock. Forests and wetlands converted to fields may never revert back to habitat for elephants, leopards, lions, antelope, and other key species that help to sustain a balanced ecosystem. This loss of habitat and change of land use represents a generational change.
The Luangwa valley, inclusive of North and South Luangwa National Parks, is Zambia’s flagship wildlife landscape, but increasing wildlife populations and human encroachment within the surrounding areas is leading to more human-animal conflict. Photo: Matt Sommerville, ILRG
To combat this growing trend, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and Frankfurt Zoological Society are partnering with local communities in the North Luangwa Ecosystem of Zambia to strengthen the land and resource rights of rural communities, in the hopes of improving long-term land use planning to prevent encroachment into wildlife habitats, protect individuals’ rights to their land, and support sustainable livelihoods.
The Luangwa Valley is the oldest section of the Great Rift valley, a landscape along Africa’s largest undammed river that blooms with the rains from November to March. At the heart of the valley are the North and South Luangwa National Parks, bordered by an escarpment on one side and the Luangwa River on the other. The area’s abundant elephant populations were decimated by poaching in the 1980s, and rhinos were poached to local extinction. Since that time, large investments have helped to return a healthy population of elephants and other species to the area.
The valley is also home to 70,000 people and over 4,500 settlements in five customary chiefdoms, a population that has tripled over the past forty years. The chiefdoms are located in areas known as Game Management Areas, buffer zones to the national parks designed with the dual objectives that both wildlife and communities flourish. But these buffers are being pressured both by increasing wildlife populations, due in part to successful conservation efforts, and farmers. Each year, farmers prepare new tracts for agriculture, cutting deeper into habitats, within the current ranges and prime habitats of elephants and hippos, as well as predators.
North Luangwa National Park is home to increasing wildlife, but each year agricultural fields extend further into the buffer zone that is managed for both wildlife and villages, increasing human-animal interactions. Photo: Matt Sommerville, ILRG
Clarifying Land Rights and Usage
In Zambia’s customary settings, land ownership and conflicts are managed by chiefs and village headpersons, who typically allocate property by telling families that they can expand their plot from one edge to a tree some distance away. Unfortunately, these verbal records are easily forgotten and open to interpretation. In addition, headpersons are often open to influence and bias, and as a result may allow some farmers with connections or influence to expand farmland outside of planned agricultural areas as fertility declines on well-established fields.
“We spend most of our time resolving conflicts between households every agriculture season. It is tiring. I know generally where people have lived, but I am asked to make decisions with very little information,” remarks a headperson from Kafoteka Village Action Group in Chifunda Chiefdom.
Working with chiefs and local community resource management groups, USAID and Frankfurt Zoological Society are supporting land use planning and documentation of households’ land and implementation of inclusive and transparent land governance across these landscapes of hundreds of thousands of hectares. With more secure land rights, communities can better manage their land and designate areas for agricultural expansion that do not create conflict with wildlife.
With USAID support, community enumerators are now documenting customary land with GPS-enabled smartphones and large-scale maps. After holding sensitization sessions with communities about the customary land documentation process, enumerators walk each and every field boundary and record the names of landholders and potential beneficiaries, paying special attention to the rights of women and children. This leads to the production of a community map for validation, which is ultimately approved by the community and signed by the chief. The chief then distributes land documents, proving an individual’s rights to a particular piece of land, which not only decreases conflict but can lead to better long-term land use planning.
Communities in North Luangwa validate their boundaries through participatory approaches. Photo: Clement Chirwa, ILRG
Preparing for the future is an urgent task. Using these community maps, the traditional leaders and community members then develop long-term land use plans that cater to human and wildlife needs.
“We know the elephants will not respect the boundaries of our fields or our land certificates. But if we can use land planning to decide where we should not allocate new fields, we may be able to live in peace,” explains Chief Chikwa. “With FZS [Frankfurt Zoological Society], we’ve done land use plans and identified the areas for conservation, agriculture, and expansion. These household field maps will feed into the bigger plan.”
The future of Zambia’s wildlife landscapes and those around the world will be determined by what happens in the multi-use zones surrounding national parks. Mapping customary land holdings and engaging in long-term land use planning is critical to reducing human-wildlife conflict. It can help communities strategically decide where to expand in order to reduce encroachment on animals’ habitats, and better balance community needs and conservation imperatives. Local communities must be active participants in this effort, helping to both secure their rights and ensure that Zambia’s rich biodiversity is protected for the next generation.
This series features Women’s Land Rights Champions within USAID to learn more about their work. This month’s Champion is Paula Pimentel of USAID/Mozambique.
Tell us about yourself
I am a senior agricultural specialist at USAID/Mozambique with more than 30 years of experience in agricultural development, including land rights and resource governance. I have an MSc in Animal Production from the University of Pretoria and an Honors degree in Veterinary Medicine from Eduardo Mondlane University.
Why are women’s land rights and resource governance important to your work? And to other USAID development work?
In Mozambique and other African countries, land and natural resources are the most valuable economic asset for rural women. Being able to access and control land-related assets is critical for women’s self-reliance and a pathway to economic growth. Strengthening women’s rights to land, and women’s ability to influence resource governance, leads to better agricultural productivity and resource management. This, in turn, contributes to many USAID development goals like improved food security and climate change mitigation and adaptation.
What are some of the biggest challenges in helping women secure land rights and what are some things being done to overcome them?
A main challenge is a lack of gender equality in land legislation or weak implementation of laws and policies. But even when the legal and policy framework provides for women’s land rights, women face many other challenges like lack of knowledge about their rights and land registration processes, unequal inheritance practices, biased dispute resolution mechanisms, restrictive social norms, and vulnerability to gender-based violence. USAID supports consultations and data analysis to improve inclusiveness in the land policy reform process in Mozambique. We are supporting programs that work directly with women, communities, and gender champions to increase women’s access to information and participation in community land governance and to shift restrictive social norms. USAID is also partnering with the private sector so that rural women in Mozambique can have secure land rights and turn these rights into concrete opportunities for economic security.
What are some of USAID’s successes in the area of women’s land rights?
USAID is partnering with one of Mozambique’s largest agroforestry companies to develop innovative business models that benefit companies and smallholder farmers. Over the past year, around 4,000 people’s land access and land use rights were formalized through the program, enabling those individuals to engage in economically viable use of the land. Over 67 percent of those farmers are women, who are now able to access and control sustainable livelihoods.
Anything else you want to share?
Land documentation and inclusive community land governance are transformative for smallholder farmers and communities as a whole, decreasing conflict and increasing investment and overall economic growth in rural areas. The USAID Mozambique Mission is keen to pursue a pathway that will continue to support and improve the country’s land policy environment, aiming at a more gender equitable and prosperous use of land by Mozambican women.
I have personally learned a lot by working with the USAID-funded ILRG Activity and I thank Thais Silveira Bessa, the activity’s Gender Specialist, for sharing key field assessments with a strong gender lens on women’s land rights in Mozambican rural communities.
The U.S. government-supported Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA) offers a successful model for advancing responsible mineral sourcing in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Great Lakes Region of Central Africa.
Minerals needed for our electronic devices such as computers and cellphones and renewable technologies such as electric vehicles are often sourced from conflict-affected countries with weak governance systems including the Democratic Republic of the Congo. For these countries, mineral wealth can be a double-edged sword. Mining is a crucial economic sector and a direct source of livelihoods for an estimated two million artisanal and small-scale miners, but the sector is also known for its damaging effects: it can finance armed group activity, fuel corruption, and cause vast environmental damage, labor violations, and human rights abuses.
Global demand for minerals is surging, especially for those minerals needed for low carbon technologies. More than ever before, we need better models to support responsible sourcing of minerals from high-risk areas. Responsible sourcing of minerals is an umbrella term used to describe sourcing designed to be “socially responsible,” “green,” or “sustainable” by implementing supply chain due diligence and sustainability schemes (Brink et al., 2019). For the last decade, the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade (PPA) has advanced responsible sourcing of minerals from the DRC and the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa.
The Alliance is a multi-stakeholder effort that brings together leaders from the private sector, government, and civil society to advance supply chain solutions to the issue of conflict minerals. It focuses on minerals linked to conflict and instability in the region and prioritizes tin, tantalum, tungsten, and gold. Jointly founded in 2011 by USAID and Department of State, the the Alliance offers funding and coordination support to organizations working in the Great Lakes region to develop verifiable conflict-free supply chains; align chain-of-custody programs and practices; encourage responsible sourcing; promote transparency; and bolster in-region civil society and governmental capacity. The Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade Secretariat is managed by the civil society organization RESOLVE.
After ten years of supporting responsible sourcing, the leaders and influencers that make up the Alliance are assessing how to best address the next generation of challenges in responsible sourcing. Since its inception, the Alliance has raised more than $2.5 million in private sector contributions, with an additional $36 million in parallel funding from USAID for mining governance and traceability projects. Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade-supported projects include early support for the development of a conflict-free artisanal gold supply chain that led to the first export of conflict-free gold from the DRC to the United States, piloting community-based interventions to mitigate human rights abuses and increase women’s leadership in mining communities, and identifying and addressing barriers to responsible finance for the artisanal sector. Successful PPA projects such as conflict-free gold supply chains, may be scaled-up by large donors such as USAID.
Virtual Delegation and the Next Generation
In December 2021, the Alliance held a virtual delegation to the Great Lakes Region of Central Africa, where nearly 70 attendees from the private sector, civil society, and the U.S. government discussed shared objectives and alignment and U.S. Embassy priorities.
Lucy Tamlyn, U.S. Ambassador to the Central African Republic; Michael Hammer, U.S. Ambassador to the Democratic Republic of the Congo; and Marcia Eugenio, Director of the Office of Child Labor, Forced Labor, and Human Trafficking at the U.S. Department of Labor, opened the virtual delegation. PPA speakers included representatives from Apple, Google, Intel, and the civil society organization, IMPACT, among others.
“With its abundance of natural resources, the DRC is at the heart of the critical minerals discussion and will play a central role in the future of green energy,” Ambassador Hammer said in the opening remarks.
The Alliance members expressed continued commitment to responsible sourcing and identified shared challenges that would benefit from deeper engagement and collaboration with U.S. embassies in the region. Alyssa Newman of Google reiterated that the Alliance, “is an important platform for connecting minerals governance to other issues and projects Google is investing in” and that Google would like it to continue to advance “due diligence and ethical supply chains, human rights, labor rights, and strengthen civil society and inclusive economic development.” Other potential areas of future collaboration that were raised included tax harmonization, the simplification of legal export processes, public-private co-investment opportunities, and the importance of tackling systemic issues including fiscal and governance reforms and land tenure.
As consumers and governments increasingly demand sustainable and ethical sourcing of minerals, public-private partnerships like the Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Trade are playing an invaluable role in bringing stakeholders from across the mineral supply chain together to discuss roadblocks and advance key objectives. The Alliance brings large private sector players to the table with civil society organizations and allows members to collectively support promising projects to ensure that increased demand for critical minerals does not come at the expense of local communities. As Intel’s Adam Schafer reflects,“As a downstream company, Intel’s partnership with the PPA [the Alliance] has been a crucial connection to engage with in-region programs and stakeholders to allow a responsible path for mineral sourcing. We look forward to continued collaboration as we work towards our goal to responsibly source all of our critical minerals.”
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The Public-Private Alliance for Responsible Minerals Tradehas a tripartite membership from across 47 partners representing private sector, civil society, and government. Private sector members represent several sectors, including electronics and communications, automotive, aerospace and jewelry. There are 25 member companies, which include Amazon, Apple, Ford, Google, Intel, Microsoft, Signet, and Verizon. PPA’s civil society and academic members come from 16 organizations and trade groups, including Global Communities, IMPACT, IPIS, Pact, Solidaridad, and The Sentry. Government representatives include USAID, US Department of State, US Department of Labor, GIZ, and the International Conference on the Great Lakes Region. The OECD Centre for Responsible Business Conduct is an observer.
This series features Women’s Land Rights Champions within USAID to learn more about their work. We’re pleased to share this interview with F. Mulbah Zig Forkpa, Jr., the Land Governance Specialist at USAID/Liberia.
Tell us about yourself.
My name is F. Mulbah Zig Forkpa, Jr. I am currently the Land Governance Specialist at USAID/Liberia. I have served in this capacity for five years, helping to implement the Mission’s land and resource governance programs-first the Land Governance Support Activity, a $15.6 million activity which ended in August 2020, and now the Land Management Support Activities, a $9.4 million activity which continues until 2025. I also serve as one of the focal persons on gender in the Mission’s Office of Democracy, Rights, and Governance. I am a proud graduate of USAID’s inaugural Land Advisors Program. I hold both BA and LLB degrees from the University of Liberia. I am finalizing my LLM in Transnational Criminal Justice. Throughout my LLM studies, I have endeavored to explore the linkages between land reform and transitional justice, as well as how land reform can sustain peace and prevent the recurrence of conflicts that were primarily provoked by land disagreements.
Why are women’s land rights and resource governance important to your work? And to other USAID development work?
Liberia has a predominantly rural population that primarily derives its livelihood from land. This means that land is placed at the center of everything that matters, including social and economic security. Where insecure land and resource governance affect an entire population, women tend to suffer the most because of the critical role they play in farming and caring for the family. There is an important relationship between improved women’s land rights and a better society. Since the essence of USAID’s work is to ensure an improved and more secure society, the obvious choice must be made to enhance women’s secure access to land and resources.
What are some of the biggest challenges in helping women secure land rights and what are some things being done to overcome them?
To the best of my knowledge, all women’s land rights assessments have shown that despite the central role women play in agricultural production, their rights and access to land are often hindered. In a male-dominated society like Liberia, these hindrances have long roots and have evolved as an acceptable social norm. In most cases, discriminatory social norms are supported by existing legal frameworks that relegate women’s land and natural resource rights to a status that is less important than those of men. In instances where discriminatory gender norms are outlawed through formal laws, the entrenched adherence to those norms, as well as powerful men’s unwillingness to lose their control over land resources makes it extremely difficult to enforce new reform laws. To offset these challenges, we have ensured that gender issues are constantly highlighted in policies and regulatory formulations, in order to streamline and amplify the gender equality provisions of the 2018 Land Rights Act of Liberia. Our land and resource governance programs have constantly embarked on strong behavioral change education and publicity campaigns. In these endeavors, we have collaborated with, and empowered, influential stakeholders including traditional leaders who are now championing the fight for gender empowerment. These strategies must become sustainable and live on even after donor support ends. In that regard, the USAID supported the establishment of a Gender Unit within the Liberia Land Authority (LLA), the central land regulatory agency in Liberia. The Gender Unit is driving the gender empowerment agenda of the LLA.
What are some of USAID’s successes in the area of land rights?
USAID has supported the enactment, establishment, and operationalization of the LLA. Initially, land services were scattered across different government entities and also marked by huge bureaucracy. The LLA has now become the single one-stop-center to access land services. USAID has ensured that the LLA has the proper tools to oversee the implementation of the Land Rights Act adopted in 2018 as the country’s primary land reform agenda. To do so, a USAID-supported consultant worked with the LLA in 2019 to create an implementation strategy for the Land Rights Act. The strategy has been effective, making it possible for stakeholders to avoid duplication in programming aimed at safeguarding rights. I firmly believe the most significant provisions of the Land Right Act are those that require the formalization of customary land. These provisions restored customary land rights, which were denied for over 100 years, and placed women’s rights on par with those of men, both in terms of land access and management. These customary land formalization provisions have been piloted by USAID in communities across three of Liberia’s 15 counties, and lessons learned are being rolled out.
Anything else you want to share?
Let me take the moment to talk briefly about the USAID/Liberia Land Management Activity, awarded in July 2021 with the intent to support at least 100 communities to own and manage their customary land efficiently. It is a continuation of USAID’s investment in the Liberian land space and has a component that places exclusive emphasis on empowering women and minority groups to participate in decision-making around land by getting elected to governance bodies. The program encourages different donors to co-locate and leverage efforts. Because of these opportunities, the communities who will secure their land rights through USAID’s activity will likely utilize their titles for various private sector commercial engagements.
In November 2021 a different kind of mobile library came to Bong County, Liberia. Through funding fromUSAID’s Land Evidence for Economic Rights, Gender, and Equality (LEVERAGE) Activity and in partnership with Landesa, Talking Books are bringing information about the Land Rights Act, passed in 2018, to 31 rural communities in the Panta, Gahn, and Wrumah clans. Talking Books are simple, hand-held audio players that deliver audio messages in local languages to low-literacy populations in areas without consistent electricity and/or internet connection.
The passage of the Land Rights Act marked an important milestone for land rights in Liberia. The Land Rights Act provides for the first time a nationwide process for communities to legally certify and manage their customary lands. The Land Rights Act also strengthens rural women’s legal rights to access and manage land by recognizing women as community members, mandating that each community member be allocated land for housing and agriculture, and requiring equal participation by women in community land governance bodies. However, biased gender norms, widespread lack of knowledge about women’s land rights in Liberia, and gendered barriers to accessing information and services mean that women are often left out of decisions about land and are unable to exercise their land rights.
To address these issues, USAID is partnering with the NGO, Landesa, to pilot an information campaign using Talking Books to build awareness about women’s land rights in Liberia. USAID’s LEVERAGE program is distributing Talking Books to women-headed households, ethnic minorities, women’s groups, and youth groups. Each Talking Book contains eight pre-recorded “chapters” that explain the Land Rights Act in a variety of local languages and dialects using culturally relevant concepts. The chapters cover the basics of the Land Rights Act and other topics such as the steps that communities can take to map their lands and apply for a formal land certificate, how to create by-laws and committees to manage the land as a community, alternative dispute resolution, women’s legal land and property rights, and the differences between tribal certificates and deeds. The chapters teach the importance of, and the legal requirement for, equal representation of women on all land management committees. Messages also explain women’s and men’s inheritance rights and explain women’s and men’s land rights inside and outside of formal and customary marriages, consistently emphasizing the rights of women as citizens and community members.
Instead of attending a one-time community training session, people can listen to the messages on Talking Books at their own pace, as many times as they like, and while doing other activities. This flexibility is especially important for women who face additional constraints on their time, mobility, and access to information and public spaces. Listeners can also record their questions and comments about the messages on the Talking Books for LEVERAGE activity staff. Using Talking Books also enables women, men, and communities to continue to learn about their land rights during the COVID-19 pandemic when frequent large gatherings are not safe.
After listening to the Talking Books, communities hold a town hall meeting to discuss their questions with local land tenure experts. Town halls include separate sessions for women to raise their questions and challenges with land rights in a setting that is less public and less influenced by gendered dynamics of public speaking. Questions that community members raise during town halls and that they record on the Talking Books will inform segments of Landesa’s nationally broadcast Land Is Life radio show. The show features prominent Liberian personalities andlinks communities across the country to a national conversation on women’s land rights.
Bringing information on women’s land rights to women, men, and youth and fostering community conversations about women’s land rights at a time when Liberia’s communities are beginning the process of formalizing land rights and establishing community land governance bodies is critical. The LEVERAGE activity aims to increase women’s participation in land governance and supports their secure and equitable access to land according to the law.
Why Women’s Land Rights Matter
Ownership and control over assets are central to women’s economic empowerment and their ability to contribute to local, national, and global economies. For many women, the most valuable of these assets are the land and natural resources from which they earn a living, provide for their families, and invest in their communities. Through programs, partnerships, research and policy reforms, USAID is working on the ground to address the barriers women face to accessing and controlling land, as well as the benefits that secure land and resource rights bring to women, their families, and communities.
Across the U.S. Government, USAID is a leader in using evidence. Evidence-based programming is a foundation for effective development. One of INRM’s main tasks is to assist USAID’s Operating Units with the use of evidence to support integrated ENRM programming. For example, using evidence and knowledge to strengthen gender equality and social inclusion is a core focus of INRM, which is reflected across all of its activities and buy-ins. INRM deploys a combination of methods for evidence generation and synthesis, aiming to improve the utility of knowledge products to inform future programming decisions.
See below for some related updates from INRM and resources from across USAID that explore the use of evidence to support the achievement of development objectives.
Gender equality guidelines will motivate Zambia’s traditional leaders to champion women’s rights in land and resource management
Women in Zambia, like in most countries, have less access to land, productive resources, and opportunities than men. Due to discriminatory gender norms that view men as heads of household, men typically have more decision making power at both the household and community level. This leads women to have less of a voice in decisions about land use, income earning opportunities, household finances, and community resource distribution.
Traditional leaders hold political, social, and cultural power in the country, and as such, can play a key role in shifting harmful gender norms and advancing gender equality. Under Zambia’s 2014 National Gender Policy, traditional leaders are required to promote gender equality in their chiefdoms. In response to this mandate, the House of Chiefs, an elected body of chiefs that provides coordination and operational support to traditional leaders throughout the country, have proven they are willing to promote gender equality advocacy campaigns, taking a proactive role in rolling out the Campaign Against Child Marriages and Gender-Based Violence and the National Action Plan on Climate Change. However, when it comes to practical action, they lack the tools to turn these national advocacy strategies into real local level reforms.
Other activities under this partnership include the Chalimbana University Diploma Course on Traditional Leadership, a masterclass specifically designed for Chiefs and traditional leaders, which includes gender equality and social inclusion in its curriculum and is now in its second year. USAID is also working with indunas, or the local advisors to chiefs, in a year-long dialogue focused on identifying and changing gender norms that hinder women’s land rights.
The guidelines focus on strengthening gender-responsiveness in areas and practices where chiefs have legal and social power such as land, forestry, wildlife, water, agriculture, climate change, child marriage, and education. In the area of women’s access and ownership of lands, the guidelines promote the participation of women in land committees, and they ban practices that amount to land-grabs from widows, including forcing widows to marry a husband’s relative in order to access land. In forest management, the guidelines bring women into local community forest management groups and provide access to extension services. Across the guidelines, chiefs are encouraged to challenge discriminatory gender norms and champion women leaders. The guidelines also provide tools to track progress against common goals and assess how these leaders are contributing to broader national gender equality initiatives.
Zambia’s chiefs, including Chieftainess Mkanda, are the custodians and administrators of the majority of Zambia’s land and natural resources. They control access to lands and forests, and their decisions are binding on the individuals who live within their chiefdoms. Chiefs are increasingly interested in securing the rights of their subjects, both men and women, through documented land rights. Photo: Matt Sommerville
Implementation
Across Zambia, traditional leaders have a great deal of power and influence. They have jurisdiction over vast swaths of customary land and resources and control everything from land use and access to inheritance rights. In their chiefdoms, they hold decision making power, mediate disputes, and act as the liaison with government officials. As authorities on cultural practices, traditional leaders can play a key role as champions of gender equality at the local level where discriminatory gender norms drastically restrict women’s access to and control over land and resources. These guidelines are a crucial step, as national laws that protect women’s land rights and inheritance protections do not extend to customary land.
The guidelines will first be piloted in two areas over the next year to help assess how the House of Chiefs can support their implementation across Zambia’s 288 chiefdoms. Launched by the Chair of the House of Chiefs, Senior Chief Luembe, and the Minister of Local Government and Rural Development, Gary Nkombo, the guidelines provide an example of how chiefs can create local and culturally appropriate practices that respond to government policy. Minister Nkombo highlighted the importance of chiefs in influencing customs, particularly in rural areas.
“These guidelines take us a step further in achieving our goal as a Ministry to operationalize the gender policy and achieve the developmental goals of our nation,” Minister Nkombo said at the event.
“There is no doubt that the measures proposed in these guidelines, if well implemented, will greatly benefit our chiefdoms and help us live our mandate as gender champions,” explains His Royal Highness Chief Luembe, Chairperson, House of Chiefs.
The valley is also home to 70,000 people and over 4,500 settlements in five customary chiefdoms, a population that has tripled over the past forty years. The chiefdoms are located in areas known as Game Management Areas, buffer zones to the national parks designed with the dual objectives that both wildlife and communities flourish. But these buffers are being pressured both by increasing wildlife populations, due in part to successful conservation efforts, and farmers. Each year, farmers prepare new tracts for agriculture, cutting deeper into habitats, within the current ranges and prime habitats of elephants and hippos, as well as predators.
I am a senior agricultural specialist at USAID/Mozambique with more than 30 years of experience in agricultural development, including land rights and resource governance. I have an MSc in Animal Production from the University of Pretoria and an Honors degree in Veterinary Medicine from Eduardo Mondlane University. 
My name is F. Mulbah Zig Forkpa, Jr. I am currently the Land Governance Specialist at USAID/Liberia. I have served in this capacity for five years, helping to implement the Mission’s land and resource governance programs-first the Land Governance Support Activity, a $15.6 million activity which ended in August 2020, and now the Land Management Support Activities, a $9.4 million activity which continues until 2025. I also serve as one of the focal persons on gender in the Mission’s Office of Democracy, Rights, and Governance. I am a proud graduate of USAID’s inaugural 
