Category: MAST Learning Platform

Research shows that strengthening women’s land and resource rights has a striking and positive impact on women’s empowerment. And yet, across much of the world, formal and informal laws and customs hinder women’s access to land and resources, leaving them unable to fulfill their full potential as agents of economic and social change. 

USAID is helping to address this longstanding inequity through its Mobile Applications to Secure Tenure (MAST), a blend of participatory mapping approaches and flexible technology tools that allows communities to document and secure their land and resource rights using a smartphone. MAST’s participatory mapping methodology emphasizes on-the-ground engagement and extensive training to empower citizens as data collectors and administrators and build their capacity to maintain land information and manage their land and resources.  

MAST engages local communities—with specific focus to the inclusion of women and youth as trusted local community members—who are trained to use maps and mobile devices to identify and record individual and communal land boundaries, land use, and ownership information. Mapping and information gathering takes place in the presence of land rights’ holders and neighbors and also engages marginalized groups, such as pastoralists. 

Across several countries where it has been deployed, MAST has already been effective in strengthening women’s land tenure and promoting the empowerment of women in communities where it has been implemented. In Tanzania, for example, the Land Tenure Assistance (LTA) activity employed a MAST approach to help women register their rights at the same rate as their male counterparts during the issuance of more than 100,000 customary land certificates (CCROs). In Zambia, the Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) project used MAST to ensure that half of all land documents in the project area were issued to women. And in Mozambique, the ILRG project implemented activities to help shift attitudes to be more supportive of women’s ownership of land. 

In March, USAID convened a learning exchange with partners from Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia who are actively using a MAST approach to document community land rights. Participants attending the exchange discussed the role of MAST in strengthening women’s land tenure and resource rights and how MAST might be made an even more powerful tool for promoting women’s empowerment. Here are five things that we learned from the discussion:

Meaningfully and directly engage women as project implementers

MAST allows for the direct involvement of citizens to map and register their land. Implementers in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia have all found that including women in training, discussions, and mapping can help ensure that their rights are accounted for during the registration process. Recruiting women as para-surveyors and dispute adjudicators ensures that their perspectives and land claims are taken into account, while also providing them with short-term employment, transferable skills, and stronger feelings of confidence and empowerment. Although gender inequalities and gender norms that govern the behavior of girls and women (such as the division of household responsibilities) can make it difficult to recruit women to implement MAST, it is critical to encourage and promote their participation in these important community processes.

Intentionally cultivate women’s participation in meetings and training to promote their engagement

A key component of the MAST approach is training and actively engaging community members in discussions about community land resources, land use planning, land laws, and the importance of securing land rights. These trainings and discussions, which provide an important foundation for any mapping process, build important community awareness and buy-in to the process that is necessary for systematic land documentation. They also ensure greater participation and uptake by community members. Implementers have found that without employing specific means to intentionally engage women, these important, initial community sensitization meetings that seek to clarify land holdings and traditional rules are often dominated by men. Holding separate, female-only trainings can provide more space for women and youth to meaningfully engage with the MAST process and share their own thoughts, questions, and concerns. 

Tailor the engagement of women to the local context

Where MAST has been implemented in Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia, local groups and communities maintain their own customs, matrilineal or patrilineal inheritance processes, familial structures, and class dynamics. Women often have responsibilities that are unique from men, which include childcare duties and domestic household management. Hence, it is important throughout the mapping process to engage women in ways that adequately account for their unique social roles, needs, and schedules. In addition, it is important to understand traditional customs and social rules that might prevent women from accessing and owning land. In some communities, for example, traditional customs and norms prohibit women from owning land in their own right. In these communities, encouraging joint registration between spouses (where both the husband and wife have their names listed on a land certificate) may be the best option to provide women with some level of tenure security.

Account for the time and effort required to change attitudes during project implementation 

Implementers across all three countries stressed that changing attitudes toward more positive perceptions of women’s land ownership takes time and effort. Since the laws and regulations governing women’s land ownership are not always known or well understood, it can take significant time to educate communities about these rules, which include the nuances of how strengthening women’s property rights can benefit entire households and communities. Multiple training sessions on the same topic might be required. Although this deliberate engagement can lengthen the time frame for land documentation using a MAST approach as compared to on-demand, targeted, and rapid land documentation, education is likely one of the most critical components to securing women’s land rights for the long-term. 

Engage men as champions of women’s participation and equality

It is well known that teaching men and boys to become champions for gender equality and women’s empowerment is essential to achieving gender-related development objectives and long-lasting social change. In fact, one of the eight operating principles listed in USAID’s Gender Equality and Women’s Empowerment Policy is to engage men and boys. Similarly, MAST implementers have found that cultivating male champions to support women’s participation in MAST, especially during early phases of the community mapping process, can help ensure greater and more meaningful participation by women. In addition, because MAST often challenges traditional gender norms around land ownership, there is a risk that women’s participation in the MAST process may encounter resistance in communities that might traditionally prevent women from accessing and owning land. Male champions, especially those in leadership positions, have been helpful in transforming traditional attitudes to promote more active participation of women and helping communities avoid pushback toward women and girls during and after the mapping process.

In rural Tanzania, as in many other low- and middle-income countries, land is a crucial asset that supports livelihoods and enables individuals and households to expand their economic opportunities. Most Tanzanians in rural areas are farmers who obtained their land through long-standing customary norms. However, weak land rights protections and a lack of documented ownership or use rights have long been seen as a source of local disputes, a constraint to how farmers use and invest in their land, and a barrier to household economic growth. A lack of land documentation can limit the participation of women and other vulnerable groups in agribusiness, and women often face higher risk of disenfranchisement of their land rights. How can the development community help?

Since 2015, USAID has worked in rural Iringa District, the heart of Tanzania’s southern agricultural region, to strengthen land rights and systematically address the lack of land documentation. Over the past five years, USAID/Tanzania’s Land Tenure Activity (LTA) helped villages and the district land office demarcate more than 70,000 land parcels and register more than 60,000 land certificates (known as CCROs), all using USAID’s digital Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST) technology. LTA represents one of the first times that MAST, which supports mapping and facilitation of the land documentation process using a mobile phone, was implemented on such a large scale.

A key question is whether this innovative approach to create stronger customary land rights has an impact on key development outcomes, such as tenure security (i.e., whether people feel confident no one will take their land or displace them), land disputes, and women’s empowerment. To assess LTA’s impacts on these outcomes, USAID commissioned Management Systems International and NORC at the University of Chicago to design and implement a rigorous impact evaluation. This IE is one of only two USAID land evaluations using a randomized control trial design.

LTA’s Impacts on Land Rights and Tenure Security

The impact evaluation of LTA has helped USAID measure the activity’s effect on land-related outcomes and understand how systematic certification of customary land rights affects smallholder farmers’ tenure security, investment decisions, empowerment, and broader livelihoods. With increasing land pressures and widespread concerns about land grabbing, knowing the impacts of formalized customary use rights is relevant to both farmers and policymakers.

The evaluation collected data via a panel survey of 1,361 households across 30 LTA villages and 30 control villages as part of a ‘gold standard’ randomized control trial design. The first round of data collection took place right before LTA began implementation in 2017. Endline data collection took place in February 2020, around 18 months after most households received their CCROs with LTA’s support. To understand how CCROs affect perceptions of land tenure security, land use, empowerment, and other key outcomes, the evaluation team interviewed the head of household and primary spouse.

A key evaluation finding is that LTA’s systematic, village-wide support was successful in helping most households obtain a CCRO. The proportion of respondents in LTA-supported villages with a CCRO in the evaluation sample rose from 3 percent at baseline to 86 percent at endline, compared with only 12 percent of control group respondents at endline. This underscores that CCROs remain largely out of reach for typical rural Tanzanian households in the absence of a systematic village-wide support program like LTA.

LTA’s support also led to a similarly large increase in formally documented land rights for women in LTA-supported villages as compared with the control group.

The evaluation results suggest that the increase in formalized land documentation also improved household tenure security. To look at common measures of tenure security, we asked household respondents how worried they felt about the risk of land being taken without permission in their community generally and for the land they personally use. The evaluation found significant improvements on both measures due to LTA’s support: an 18 percent decrease on average in a household’s probability of expressing community-wide concern over land expropriation and a 16 percent decrease on average in a household’s probably of feeling tenure insecure.

Tenure security improved for both men and women, and to a greater extent for female relative to male households heads. The evaluation also found a substantial increase in tenure security for female primary spouses supported by LTA. These improvements are especially important in the rural Tanzanian context, where women often have a harder time claiming and defending their land rights or exercising control over land decisions. Based on the evaluation results, USAID/Tanzania’s support for formalized customary land documentation seems to have not only expanded people’s access to CCROs but also led to more equitable access to land documentation in ways that allay gender-based concerns around land grabbing.

Among households that received CCROs, self-reported familiarity with land laws was also higher for female primary spouses than for the male household heads. This finding appears to reflect LTA’s emphasis and awareness raising around women’s land rights, together with opportunities for women to participate in trainings, meetings, and activities in Iringa related to land documentation.

LTA’s Impacts on Credit Access

The evaluation results related to credit are more nuanced and provide important learning around the role of CCROs in expanding rural villagers’ access to credit and economic opportunities. The evaluation found no evidence of a change in credit access (stable at around 13 percent for both groups and survey rounds) or amount (around 200,000 Tanzanian shillings or $86) as a result of the CCRO. Iringa District is similar to much of rural Tanzania in that borrowing from formal sources such as commercial banks is low and villagers are stymied by a lack of creditworthy business activities (as perceived by banks), poor business skills, and complicated loan processes. These results also point to wide gender disparities in borrowing sources and amount of credit obtained, underscoring opportunities for targeted programming to bring women’s economic empowerment on par with men. The null results on credit and differential access by gender suggest future programming should address these issues in conjunction with CCRO provisioning, and USAID’s Land Evidence for Economic Rights and Gender Empowerment (LEVERAGE) activity is conducting targeted learning on this topic.

Looking Ahead

USAID/Tanzania’s support to Iringa villages and the district land office in recognizing customary land rights has been critical in helping rural farmers protect their land, expand their livelihoods, and stave off uncompensated expropriation in the face of rapid urbanization and rural land use change. LTA’s achievements – including helping register around 60,000 CCROs across 30 villages, providing training to 220 women’s groups, and supporting the district land office to lead the technological and administrative process – are notable. The impact evaluation of LTA provides robust evidence of the initial impacts of CCROs to farmer tenure security and other near-term effects, and suggests the foundation has been laid for longer-term benefits to come. This rigorous evaluation suggests that formalizing customary land rights in the rest of Iringa District, and thousands of other villages across Tanzania, is well worth the effort.

Different forms of GBV are linked to land documentation, including economic violence such as a denial of land access, ownership, and inheritance rights, forced displacement, and property grabbing. Banner Photo credit CLEMENT CHIRWA – TETRA TECH

A USAID brief, published to mark 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence, reveals important lessons from land rights registration activities in Zambia

Securing women’s land rights is an important global development goal and has been linked to significant gains in women’s economic empowerment and community development. At the same time, the process of documenting these rights can create resentment and increase conflict not only between spouses, but also within families and communities, often leading to gender-based violence. This is one of the overarching lessons gleaned from land documentation data collected by USAID in recent years.

When the opportunity to register land rights is introduced to a rural community, it can create a sense of urgency and prompt people to confirm land boundaries and resolve long-standing disputes over ownership through a rapid process, risking the exclusion of people from registering their rights, especially vulnerable groups such as elderly and single women and women with disabilities.

“We have come to realize there is a damned-if-you-do and a damned-if-you-don’t dynamic at play. Either women are excluded from land, which is a form of gender-based violence, or if they assert their rights, they are subjected to other forms of violence ” explains Patricia Malasha, Zambia Gender and Social Inclusion Advisor for the USAID-funded program Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) and one of the authors of the brief.

“We can’t just ignore gender based violence in land documentation.”

For the last five years, USAID has promoted customary land documentation in Zambia, supporting partners to document the land rights using Mobile Approaches to Secure Tenure (MAST). This has resulted in registration of over 30,000 parcels of land benefiting 50,000 people, of whom nearly half are women. The approach is socially inclusive and promotes gender integration to ensure that women’s land rights are registered.

Since 2019, USAID’s local partners have collected qualitative data and stories on gender-based violence while documenting customary land. The results, presented in the brief Gender-Based Violence and Land Documentation and Administration in Zambia, provide useful lessons and recommendations that have the strength to inform and guide how rights documentation processes proceed.

The personal stories illustrated in the brief are powerful examples demonstrating that the protective role of secure land rights and their ability to increase women’s power to renegotiate relationships is not straightforward. Well-intentioned pressure to reach high targets of parcels documented in short periods of time can increase the risk of conflict within communities, as well as gender-based violence. Similarly, pushing for the inclusion of women in land records or joint titling without engaging in parallel work to address broader gender norms may inadvertently put women at risk.

The brief was published in order to continue the dialogue around gender-based violence and as part of the International Day Against Violence Against Women on November 25, and the following 16 Days of Activism that finalize on Human Rights Day, December 10.

USAID will continue to identify and mitigate risks related to gender-based violence and its relationship to land rights registration activities over the next three years under the USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance Program across intervention countries.