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This series features Women’s Land Rights Champions within USAID to learn more about their work. This month’s Champion is Marcela Chaves of USAID/Colombia.  

Tell us about yourself.

My name is Marcela Chaves and I have worked for USAID/Colombia since 2009. I am a business administrator and have an MBA. I was born in Colombia, moved and grew up in New York, and returned to Colombia many years ago. My professional career started in the private sector. I have been working on land issues with USAID for over ten years now and have fallen in love with land work. I have been able to understand how supporting land rights can make a difference in very complex and challenging environments, and how it can have a positive and transformational impact on rural families in Colombia.

Why are women’s land rights and resource governance important to your work? And to other USAID development work?

Women’s land rights are a central piece of our work in the Rural and Economic Development Office at USAID/Colombia and a cross-cutting issue for our Mission. As part of the support provided to the Colombian state to advance towards more cost efficient land titling in rural areas, and in order to have a better chance to reach all those families that have been waiting for years and sometimes decades to access these titles, securing women’s equal access to these property rights is vital. Leaving women behind is never an option. Besides, research shows that helping women to access their rights to land results in significant benefits to the health and education conditions of their households and increases their ability to invest in agricultural production long-term. Additionally, the only way USAID’s land governance work can be sustainable once assistance ends is to make sure equal rights to land are promoted and that local governments have the necessary capacity to enact sound land governance policies on their own.

What are some of the biggest challenges in helping women secure land rights and what are some things being done to overcome them?

Based on what we have seen so far, there are several challenges to helping women secure land rights, including: 1) institutional barriers that exclude women from obtaining a land title 2) the need to sensitize public officials in the importance of including  women in land titling either as heads of households or jointly as part of a couple, and 3) cultural barriers that prevent women from knowing what their rights are and how to exercise them, among others. To address these challenges, USAID has provided support through two different land programs. The current program is Land for Prosperity. This program includes coming to agreement with the government to use forms that collect women’s information for subsequent title processing, providing training and tools for government officials to better understand the importance of doing so, and working with communities to sensitize all relevant actors about the importance of women’s land rights through tools such as radio soap operas, songs, and community plays that convey these important messages. 

What are some of USAID’s successes in the area of women’s land rights?

One of the main successes has been issuing land titles with the Colombian government in which at least 50% of the beneficiaries are women. A second important success has been demonstrating how women can become more active and participate more in USAID-supported  activities to do massive land titling; the majority of the social leaders supporting parcel sweeps in targeted municipalities are women. Finally, being able to agree on titling methods that include women’s rights and create pathways to process their cases has been an important step forward. 

Anything else you want to share?

Every time we have the chance to go to the field and see the excitement of all the women who access a land title, it fills my heart with joy and makes all the effort worthwhile.  

Cross-posted from IIED. Guest blogger Megan Huth details how USAID is employing a novel approach to ensure that rural women participate in decisions about land and natural resource use in Liberia

In Liberia, in May 2021, the Bluyema Clan’s most outspoken and politically active women gathered to agree who would run for election for the leadership positions of its Community Land Development and Management Committee (hereafter, “the Committee”) — the body responsible for making decisions on land management and use.

Bluyema is nestled in thick forests along the Liberia-Guinea border where, like most tenure systems in Liberia, land rights are based on customary laws derived from local lineage-based governance systems. But the lack of community-led land governance tools has left many rural communities—and women in particular—stripped of their rights to forests or viable agricultural land.

The 2018 Land Rights Act recognized customary land ownership and provided a legal mechanism for rural communities to secure land tenure. The Act requires communities to include women and youth representatives as equal partners in local land governance structures, like the Committee. Despite these legal provisions, discriminatory gender norms prevent women from speaking about and participating in political matters in rural communities like Bluyema. Village leadership roles are almost always held by men.

Reaching Out to Women 

These all-women gatherings to discuss leadership within the Committee were facilitated by the Liberian land rights organization, Sustainable Development Institute (SDI), in partnership with the USAID-funded Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program. The discussions are part of a broader strategy to increase the participation of women in community land governance.

In the run-up to the Committee elections, SDI highlighted land experts and civil society leaders on “Radio Life”, a radio program that was broadcast multiple times in communities in Lofa County where Bluyema is located. The radio program provided general information about the customary land governance process and encouraged women to participate in land management bodies, such as the Committee.

“More than anything, the radio show was aimed at men to support women in their quest to engage with the land documentation process,” explains Nora Bowier, SDI Coordinator.

The radio talk show also provided a conduit to reach communities who are not currently involved with customary land documentation and show them that adjacent communities like Bluyema are taking advantage of documentation to secure the future of their land.

In the week prior to Committee elections in Bluyema, Bowier and other SDI coordinators led gender-focused discussions with approximately 30 women. Discussions focused on women’s land rights, women’s participation in land and natural resource management, and strategies to effectively work with male counterparts. The women discussed and decided who should run for the Committee’s leadership roles, while also developing community outreach and campaign strategies. Bowier also worked with each candidate on a one-on-one basis, providing the women with a safe space for open discussions about their concerns and needs.

Just a day before the election, Gbelee Sumo — who decided to run for the position of Chairperson after the all-women gatherings — gave a memorable campaign speech to the community, calling for women to stand up and support each other.

“She stood up to build the confidence of the community,” Bowier recalls. “Gbelee is eager to lead and to represent the voices of women who have been marginalized for generations. She made it clear there is a space where women will sit at the same table with their male counterparts.”

New Outcomes, New Leaders

In June 2021, four women were elected to both the Vice Chairperson and Treasurer leadership positions in the Committees throughout Lofa County. Gbelee Sumo, the leader from Bluyema, became Liberia’s first Committee chairperson. “The project is helping to open the eyes of women who have been placed at the margin of society in terms of decision-making and participation in local government,” says Chairperson Sumo.

Over the past 18 months, USAID partner SDI reached over 300 women from more than 30 rural communities across Liberia. As a result, 60 women are now elected Committee officers in three counties, representing just under 50 percent of the available leadership positions.

Land Stewards

Communities like Bluyema, which have successfully created by-laws and community land governance committees that meet the Land Rights Act’s requirements for women’s participation, can now continue with the land documentation process outlined by Liberia’s Land Authority in a more representative and inclusive way.

When land management committees represent a wider cross-section of the community, they can significantly improve land and natural resource management. Women often know more about boundary lines, because they are the ones engaged in agro-forestry activities like growing food and collecting firewood.

In addition, rural communities rely on logging as their principal means of income, and with an inclusive governance body where women play a key role, logging revenue is more likely to benefit the entire community and not just one person or one family.

“Corruption is being reduced. We have already seen some examples where communities are putting a halt to land grabbing,” says Bowier. “It is now more difficult for a chief to single-handedly come up with a contract between himself and a logging concession.”

Impact Evaluation

USAID has worked to strengthen inclusive land governance in Liberia for more than a decade. A recent impact evaluation of USAID-led customary land interventions shows that this type of governance is novel for many communities, and behavior change does not happen overnight. Continued efforts are needed to engage men as supporters of women’s leadership, ensure that women’s participation is truly meaningful, and avoid risks of backlash and gender-based violence for these new women leaders.

Continuing the work

To provide longevity and sustainability to the efforts and support for the Liberia Land Authority and Liberia’s rural communities, USAID continues to implement land tenure programs across Liberia. In 2021, USAID kicked off the Liberia Land Management Activity, a four-year, $9.4 million project that will build on inclusive management of communal land and promote the formalization of land rights in Liberia, with special consideration for the rights of women and marginalized groups.

 

About the author: Megan Huth is a Senior Associate in Tetra Tech’s Land Tenure and Property Rights sector and the Project Manager for the USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program.

Guest Author: Colin Christensen, One Acre Fund

Today, with up to 811 million people going to bed hungry, the world is well off track from our collective SDG2 goal of achieving “zero hunger” by 2030. As climate change makes weather patterns more unpredictable, an estimated 78 million more people will face chronic hunger in 2050 relative to a baseline where there is no climate variability. With hunger rates rising globally, it is critical to consider the role of securing land rights as an important but often overlooked tool to help combat the fight against hunger. 

Today, nearly 1 billion people globally have insecure rights to land, a great proportion of whom are smallholder farmers. Empowering smallholder farmers to grow more food has often offered the most direct path to solving the hunger crisis, given that hundreds of millions of smallholders around the world produce 60 to 80 percent of the already limited domestic food supply in many countries. However, smallholder farmers face a variety of challenges not only stemming from environmental constraints (such as precipitation, temperature and extreme events) but also from a range of systemic barriers that limit their ability to grow enough food. Farmers often lack sufficient cash to buy needed inputs like fertilizer and seeds and adequate credit for banks to lend to them. In addition, input distribution networks, which can be geographically limited, can fail to reach more remote areas where many smallholders live. Information networks that are critical for farmers to make key decisions about planting often lack information on weather patterns, soil health, and market demand to help maximize the return on their investment. 

The good news is that through increasing access to financing, input distribution, technology, and training, many of these dynamics and investment constraints can be partially overcome. Still, these “traditional” interventions often depend on, and can even overlook what could be a key leverage point to ending hunger: securing land rights. At One Acre Fund, we have seen preliminary indications that the farmers we serve invest significantly more in land that they own compared to land that they rent. For example, a survey with our clients in Rwanda found that these farmers were more likely to apply techniques that would increase their soil productivity on land that they owned compared to land that they rented. From the survey, 73 percent of respondents said that they only applied agricultural lime on land they owned, and 82 percent said they only engaged in terracing (a technique that increases farmability and land productivity of sloped fields) on land they owned. In these cases, maize yields were 30 percent higher on owned land compared to rented land. In addition, the same survey found that 94 percent of farmers planted trees only on land that they owned, which highlights the potential value of land ownership to meeting important goals related to climate adaptation and mitigation.  

One Acre Fund has just launched a multi-year project with Landesa to further explore the relationship between food security and land tenure and investigate possible solutions to addressing key gaps in land tenure. Finding these solutions is critical: one World Bank report found that 90 percent of Africa’s rural land remains untitled today, and is “susceptible to land grabbing, expropriation without fair compensation and corruption.” Given these challenges—which are even more dire for women farmers who face higher rates of exclusion from formal titles—it makes perfect sense that a smallholder farmer might be reluctant to invest in what should be her most important asset.

Solving this problem of securing land tenure and formal property rights is certainly not an easy task, as it involves navigating some complex political dynamics and cultural norms. But just because it is difficult does not mean it should be ignored. Today, the hundreds of millions of hungry people around the world deserve as comprehensive an effort as possible to achieve a zero-hunger future, and these efforts should not overlook the importance of secure land rights. Addressing this problem is a critical piece of  our anti-hunger tool-kit.

This series features Women’s Land Rights Champions within USAID to learn more about their work This month’s Champion is Catherine Tembo, Ph.D., USAID/Zambia’s Natural Resources Specialist in the Economic Development Office. 

Tell us about yourself.

I currently serve as USAID/Zambia’s Natural Resources Specialist in the Economic Development Office. My work involves providing technical program support, Interagency, donor, and host country government coordination on sustainable landscapes. With the understanding that secure land and resource rights are a cornerstone of economic growth and poverty reduction, part of my work involves strengthening land and resource governance for economic growth, and food security. Through my work, I support initiatives that help reduce deforestation, increase sustainable development, and a range of other natural and community resource benefits.

During my ten years of working with the Agency, I have had an opportunity to manage land- related programming. I have supported USAID’s assistance on land-related issues as the Activity Manager for the Tenure and Global Climate Change (TGCC) activity, which aimed to increase tenure security while also supporting agroforestry extension services. I have also served as Activity Manager for the Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) activity, which is undertaking initiatives to support land tenure security in Zambia, as well as improved planning, customary governance, women’s economic empowerment and natural resource management. 

Why are women’s land rights and resource governance important to your work? And to other USAID development work?

Women’s land rights and resource governance are critical as they provide economic security for families and communities. Generally women have been known to contribute a greater proportion of their agricultural and natural resource based income to their family and improve food security. An insecure household is a threat to sustainable natural resource management.

What are some of the biggest challenges in helping women secure land rights and what are some things being done to overcome them?

My work of promoting women’s land rights has not been without challenges. Women have been marginalized for a long time and it is only now that they are trying to get out of their cocoons. With our support and working in partnership with the Zambian Government and the traditional leadership, we are seeing an increase in women owning land. In addition, more women are now taking up leadership positions in various natural resources management committees.

What are some of USAID’s successes in the area of women’s land rights?

We have recorded a number of successes with regards to women’s land rights. Traditional leaders are shifting gender norms and strengthening women’s land rights. We have Zambian Chiefs championing gender equality in land and natural resources governance. We have supported Zambia’s National Land Policy, which strives to ensure that 50% of the available land for alienation is allocated to women and encourages Chiefs to allocate land to women, and we have supported the development of customary gender guidelines. We have supported capacity-building activities focused on gender integration and community natural resource governance in Zambia, particularly with civil society and private sector partners. Furthermore, we have worked closely with traditional leaders (both men and women) to open them up to being champions and promoting women’s land rights. 

Anything else you want to share?

I must say that I have enjoyed every bit of working on land related matters here at the Agency. I appreciate every aspect of the work that I do, especially since my work includes empowering women in land and improving resource governance – this always puts a smile on my face.

This blog originally appeared on Climatelinks. 

By Daniel Evans

Global sustainability initiatives like the UN Sustainable Development Goals have a land problem: How to achieve multiple land-intensive goals when there is only so much land to go around. Urgent needs for land, especially in developing countries, include protecting and restoring carbon-rich forests, conserving habitats to preserve the diversity of life on Earth, and producing enough food to sustain human populations.

With agriculture driving deforestation, global climate protection and biodiversity conservation goals seem to collide with the drive to produce more food. Researchers warn of an impending “food security-biodiversity-climate” crisis and “looming land scarcity.”

Land-use planning can help meet these challenges. When successful, land-use plans allocate land efficiently and equitably. Planners assess the suitability of land parcels for different uses, put available land to its “best” use, meet diverse needs of multiple stakeholders, and create a lasting governance framework for people to resolve conflicts.

But how effective is land-use planning? How often does it work as a tool to sustainably manage land? More specifically, how effectively does national land-use planning prevent agricultural expansion into forests?

A new paper from the ProLand project addresses this question by reviewing available evidence: National Land-Use Planning to Prevent Deforestation at the Agricultural Frontier: A Synthesis of the Evidence and a Case Study from Cameroon.

The paper finds that land-use planning can be effective, but there have been only a few cases where evidence shows that it has worked, largely because few developing countries have established the foundations needed for national land-use planning to succeed.

Cameroon is a notable exception. Cameroon’s land-use planning efforts to protect its rainforest reduced deforestation in a 2.4-million-hectare area where agricultural expansion is the principal threat. Cameroon’s experience highlights steps that other governments should consider taking, as well as common challenges that practitioners are likely to encounter, and that donors should anticipate.

Ultimately, the paper identifies five important conditions for land-use planning success:

• Land-use planning should be authorized by laws or regulations with mechanisms to enforce compliance.
• Land-use planning should be based on information that permits a thorough assessment of land resources in the planning area.
• Participants should have technical and managerial capacity to design and implement land-use plans.
• Financial resources for planning and implementation are essential.
• Land-use planning should include broad participation of multiple stakeholders.

The paper also addresses key challenges. Successful land-use planning critically depends on good governance. But many governments in developing countries have low capacity to design land-use plans or assure adherence to the rule of law and transparent and equitable implementation. Land-use planning might require decades of investment supported by donors, reveal broad weaknesses in governance, and bring to light divergent objectives between donors and the governments they support.

National land-use planning can help achieve multiple, land-intensive development goals, but development practitioners should be prepared for a long, costly process and be ready to provide consistent support for good governance.

An innovative USAID-PepsiCo partnership is supporting women potato farmers in India to see farming as a future

Last year, if you had told Bulti Porel that she would become an official potato supplier for multinational food, snack, and beverage corporation PepsiCo and expand her farming enterprise in the process, she would have been incredulous. Women are not generally recognized as farmers in West Bengal, India’s second largest potato-producing state. People see them as day laborers, and men see them as simply ‘helpers’ on family farms. Customarily in this region, women do not control land or make decisions about production, and are not included in farming skills training. As a result, independent farming is not a future many West Bengali women can look forward to.

This is changing for some women, thanks to a U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and PepsiCo partnership that is making the business case for women’s empowerment in the potato supply chain in West Bengal. Over the past two years, the partnership developed the capacity of PepsiCo’s local staff to empower women by supporting them with access to land and by providing them with the skills and knowledge to recognize and enhance their contributions to potato farming. PepsiCo’s sustainable farming training materials were adapted for women farmers through a gender-responsive and participatory approach to language and concepts.

Bulti Porel acquired skills through a series of agronomy training sessions tailored for women in 2019 that encouraged her to increase the area of her land and grow more potatoes in the second season. More than becoming a potato supplier, Bulti is increasing her knowledge of sustainable agriculture practices and making the decisions about what happens on her farm.

“My husband feels that I am taking care of farming activities, and now we buy seeds in my name. This is a great recognition I received from my family and this has happened only because of the training I received,” she said.

Potato farmer Namita Khan said that attending the training sessions gave her greater confidence to independently manage her potato farming and led her to encourage other women in her village to attend. Intentionally reaching women in the supply chain has a multiplying effect since women are more prone to share newly-acquired skills with their family members, neighbors, and fellow laborers.

Assisting Women Access Land

Access to land is a challenge for women in West Bengal, particularly those from the scheduled tribes and castes or religious minorities. The partnership is addressing this barrier by supporting women’s groups to lease farmland to produce potatoes and enter the PepsiCo value chain as independent suppliers. 

“I was not comfortable and told her to stay away from this activity. How is it possible that women can farm on their own?” Azijul Rahaman, a husband asked.

At first, Rahaman was apprehensive about his wife, Anwar Begum, participating in a land leasing group and tried to dissuade her. The local male aggregator, who consolidates potatoes from a range of producers to supply larger quantities to PepsiCo, helped persuade him to trust his wife and her ambitions, showing the importance of engaging influential men in the supply chain to champion women’s empowerment.

Since these discussions, Begum and her group, Eid Mubarak, have already made two potato harvests and embraced their role as formal suppliers. In fact, in 2020-2021, Eid Mubarak managed the first and only women-led PepsiCo demonstration farm in West Bengal, showcasing agricultural technology, sustainable farming practices, and women’s leadership in farming.

Promising Results in Empowering Women

Over the past two years USAID and PepsiCo have delivered training to over 1,000 women farmers on climate-smart, regenerative agriculture practices. With increased access to information and resources, women have gained confidence, mobility, collective agency, income, and decision-making power in their families. 

The partnership is doing more than empowering women farmers, it is shifting discriminatory gender norms that for generations have kept women out of the formal economy. Couples like Bulti and her husband are setting powerful positive examples in their villages that women can manage farming operations and men value their wives as equal partners. The perceptions of women’s roles in potato farming are changing in households and communities, and women are increasingly recognized as farmers in their own right.

USAID and PepsiCo will continue to build upon these results. Over the next two years, the partnership will reach more women farmers with regenerative agriculture technical training and support more women’s land leasing groups. The partnership is also creating opportunities for farming couples to reflect on gender roles, supporting women-led demonstration farms, and promoting women’s participation in male-dominated spaces such as seed distribution and visits to PepsiCo factories. These activities are critical to shift discriminatory gender norms and model positive behaviors that promote gender equality in the supply chain.

Empowering women in West Bengal has opened an important pathway to expand PepsiCo’s farming supply base. The four-year USAID partnership will build upon these promising results and continue to demonstrate that empowering women can promote women’s agency, increase income for families, and help PepsiCo meet its economic, social, and environmental goals. 

A factsheet with Key Results of the first two years of the USAID-PepsiCo partnership in West Bengal is available here.  

Read the story of Shyamal Pal, Potato Aggregator and Long-Time Champion of Women’s Empowerment.

 

A USAID partnership with agriculture company Grupo Madal is improving productive land use and providing new economic opportunities

By: Thais Bessa, Gender Advisor, USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program

Joana Albrinho Ajudante and her neighbors started growing rice, sweet potatoes, and cassava on land that is owned by the Mozambican agricultural commodity producer Grupo Madal in 2017. Her small plot (0.06 hectares or 1/7 of an acre), which was not being used by the company, provided enough food for her family, but due to its small size and insecure land arrangement, she never had the opportunity to expand and earn enough income to help support her husband and three children.

Rather than evicting the farmers who had encroached upon its lands in the province of Zambézia, Grupo Madal is partnering with USAID to create a program that allows 1,300 farmers from adjacent communities to farm 1,000 hectares of the company’s land. With USAID’s support, Grupo Madal is also piloting a program that will allow another 2,000 people from 14 communities adjacent to Grupo Madal’s farms to become contract farmers and produce cash crops on their own land. In addition to the right to use the land, the programs provide inputs, extension services, and guaranteed market for cash crops, ensuring that land, which was formerly unused, is now productive and generating income for farming families and the company. 

In many rural communities in Mozambique, women often face restrictive gender roles, unequal decision-making power, and limited access to resources such as financing and land. 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. Evidence suggests that strengthening women’s land and resource rights can have a positive impact on their bargaining power and decision-making, particularly around important household-level decisions such as expenditures for children’s health and education and intergenerational transfers, including inheritance.

As a part of USAID’s priority on women’s economic empowerment, the USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program is supporting Grupo Madal to integrate a strong focus on gender equality, social inclusion, and women’s empowerment in land allocation policies and procedures and in how the company engages with smallholder farmers. More than 85 percent of the 3,300 farmers participating in the ingrower and outgrower programs are women. Gender-responsive extension support is giving these smallholder farmers the assistance and confidence that optimizes results for them and the company. 

Under the USAID and Grupo Madal partnership, Joana has secured the use of a half hectare plot of land (1.25 acre), and she is eager to increase production, earn more income, support her family, and invest in other productive endeavors. “I am waiting to sign the contract with the company to start producing on the land. With the money I will get from sales, I will also be able to buy cowpeas from other producers and sell them to Madal as a way to create another business,” she said. Farmers like Joana are producing coconuts, beans, and other commodities to be sold to Grupo Madal, while also growing subsistence crops for their families, increasing food security in the rural communities. 

Advancing women’s decision-making opportunities

ILRG is also supporting Grupo Madal’s plan to expand their network of community extension facilitators to better reach, benefit, and empower the new farmers. In February 2021, using an open and transparent process, Grupo Madal recruited seven community members, four women and three men, with farming experience and communication skills to reinforce the work of the company’s extension officers and increase engagement within their communities. Joana was selected to be one of the facilitators. 

Most Grupo Madal extension agents are men, and having women engaged as community facilitators has improved the company’s ability to reach women farmers. This community-based extension model promotes women’s empowerment, as it inspires other women by increasing not only technical skills, but also their self-esteem and confidence. Together with the other extension agents and community facilitators, Joana participated in a training focused on addressing harmful gender norms, gender-based violence, and how to approach extension services in a gender-responsive way.

Every day, Joana improves her farming skills and builds upon her decade of farming experience. By joining the extension network, she has increased her knowledge about gender issues, human rights, and social norms. Her extensive knowledge of local customs, traditions, and language allows Joana to share information with communities in a relaxed and informal way. Community members see Joana as a trustworthy friend, neighbor, and more and more as a successful farmer.

(Please note: This blog includes sensitive content regarding violence. It was originally published by the International Institute for Environment and Development here.)

By: Thais Bessa, Global Gender Advisor, USAID Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) program

While Ruth was still mourning the sudden loss of her husband, his younger brother arrived on her three-acre farm to deliver a deadly threat: she must leave her home and farm or he would kill her and her children.

“He came with an axe,” she recalled. “I was so afraid. I had seven young children and there was nowhere to go and no way for me to feed them except for the farm.”

Taking agricultural land from widows is common across much of the world, including in sub-Saharan Africa, where most land – around 90% − is undocumented. When land is documented, the property is often registered in the name of men, who are considered ‘heads of the household’. Women are left off the documentation, and when their spouses die they regularly lose access to the family land.

In Zambia, laws on state-administered land stipulate that women and their children should inherit land, but in rural areas – such as the Eastern Province, where most of the land is regulated by customary rules − these laws do not apply. Land is divided into chiefdoms and regulated by customary rules.

Recognising women as landowners

The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) funded Integrated Land and Resource Governance (ILRG) Program is helping to resolve long-standing tensions over customary rights and promoting gender-responsive practices to encourage joint land registration. To do this, USAID is strengthening the capacity of local land documentation organizations in Zambia’s Eastern Province like the Chipata District Land Alliance and the Petauke District Land Alliance.

Through the ILRG Program, USAID has equipped these organizations with pioneering participatory methods and socially inclusive technologies like USAID’s Mobile Approaches to Secure Tenure (MAST) to document land in areas under customary laws. The MAST approach is designed for inclusive land documentation, with provisions to include persons of interest, which ensures that the process does not inadvertently simplify the representation of rights or consolidate collective rights into an individual one. Over the past six years, USAID’s Integrated Land and Resource Governance program and the two local partners have documented the land rights of more than 30,000 parcels of land in Zambia, including 155,000 rights holders, nearly half of whom are women.

Leading by example

To complement the MAST approach, USAID integrated gender considerations into every step of the land documentation process. At the community sensitization stage, when partners explain land documentation steps and benefits, they also provide information on gender equality and social inclusion. Enumerators from partner organizations, who collect and verify data from each land parcel and landowner, were trained on gender equality, women’s land rights and gender-based violence. In addition, the Chipata and Petauke District Land Alliances engaged a gender specialist or focal point. Enumerators were encouraged to examine their own biases and how to find socially acceptable ways to encourage the participation of women and youth.

A series of practical guidance tools were developed for enumerators and other field staff involved in the documentation process. These practice ‘notes’ cover topics like gender-sensitive language, gender sensitization of communities and household members, best practices on speaking with traditional leaders about gender, and gender-responsive conflict resolution. The practice notes are useful since they detail specific gender barriers and concrete solutions for each step of land documentation, such as organizing meetings and boundary walks around women’s care taking responsibilities, ensuring that registration forms have space for more than one landowner, and collecting sex-disaggregated data.

The USAID approach also involved working with chiefs and other traditional leaders to promote meaningful participation of women in local land committees and gender-sensitive conflict resolution. In Zambia’s Eastern Province, USAID has focused on traditional leaders, also referred to as indunas, to influence changes in gender norms and behaviours in relation to land ownership and access practiced in their chiefdoms.

With USAID support, the Chipata and Petauke District Land Alliance staff developed their capacity to talk about gender equality at community meetings, centered on the benefits of secure land tenure for men, women, boys, and girls. In addition, staff were encouraged to reach out directly to women and men for one-on-one sensitization sessions. These dialogues offered a safe space for people to voice concerns and catalyzed getting women’s names on land documentation, marking significant progress for women in societies where speaking in front of men or speaking up in public is discouraged.

Securing land, securing futures

Following a one-on-one sensitization session with a land expert from the Chipata District Land Alliance, Ruth approached the local land committee to share how her brother-in-law was threatening to take her land. The committee intervened on her behalf and allowed her to assert her right to the farmland. Ruth and her children received a land certificate naming them as the owners.

“When I got the certificate and I settled back on the land, my brother-in-law came shortly after to threaten me once again,” recalled Ruth. “But this time I was not scared, I had a certificate and it says the land belongs to me and my children. I am a landholder because it has the signature of our chief,”  explained Ruth.

Land certificates and the broader documentation and dispute resolution processes are approved by local chiefs, reinforcing local validity and showing the importance of engaging influential stakeholders to ensure women’s safety and secure land tenure beyond having a certificate in hand.

Over the past six years, this work has shown that making land documentation gender-responsive requires a range of complementary approaches: inclusive technology, developing partner capacity, practical and detailed field guidance, and gender sensitization of communities and traditional leaders. This can empower women to assert their rights so they are included in land certificates, and change customary law, helping women like Ruth to feel confident that ownership of their land will be secure to support their livelihoods – and the livelihoods of their children – into the future.

Democracy is going backward in many places USAID works. The V-Dem Institute reported in 2020 that Latin America and the Asia-Pacific have reverted to a level of democracy last seen 30 years ago, while 60 percent of sub-Saharan countries are classified as “electoral autocracies.” Participatory natural resource management (PNRM) stands out as a potential means to counter democratic backsliding. Previous USAID work and well-known examples like community forest groups in Nepal and conservancies in Namibia support the proposition that PNRM can help achieve positive democratic outcomes.

See below for some updates on INRM’s work with USAID on PNRM and participatory land mapping. We also share some relevant resources from across USAID that explore land and resource governance, approaches to reduce corruption, and other governance issues.

In this digest:

INRM’s current governance work

• PNRM could play a role in mitigating democratic backsliding
• Participatory land mapping can help strengthen local governance
• HEARTH and INRM creating common indicators for cross-sectoral MEL

Additional USAID resources on governance

• Targeting natural resources corruption
• Five ways USAID is protecting the environment by improving land and resource governance
• Thinking and working politically to protect biodiversity

Read the full digest here.