Category: Uncategorized

By the USAID LTS Team

Liberia depends on its forests. The forestry sector contributes 10 percent of the country’s GDP. One in three rural Liberians (1.5 million people) live in forested areas and rely on forests for a significant source of their livelihoods. And Liberia’s forests are a global biodiversity hotspot, comprising more than half of West Africa’s remaining Upper Guinean tropical forest. Yet Liberia’s forests remain under serious threat.

Notwithstanding its importance to the country, sustainable forest management – at both national and community levels – remains a considerable challenge, in part due to lack of reliable information regarding forest condition and resources rights.[1] Moreover, communities have limited information about their customary resources, despite the recent passage of the Land Rights Act of 2017 (LRA), which provides the legal framework for forest communities to document land boundaries outside of the forest conservation areas. In response to this dilemma, USAID is testing its Mobile Applications to Secure Tenure (MAST) initiative in Liberia to help communities define, map, record, and document their resources to enhance biodiversity conservation while improving community forest management. MAST provides a participatory framework and flexible tools that empower citizens in the process of documenting and managing their forest resources. The end result is clearer, stronger rights and greater incentives to invest and conserve resources.

The MAST Liberia pilot works closely with USAID/Liberia’s Forest Incomes for Environmental Sustainability (FIFES) program and villages in Blei Community Forest in Liberia’s Nimba County to test participatory methods that enable communities to collect, validate and manage information regarding community forest and customary resources. While communities surrounding Blei Forest highly value forest protection, they are faced with the need to balance conservation with the development of alternative, resource-based sources of income. The pilot aims to enhance the community’s ability to clarify the use of forest and customary resources, to monitor their condition, and to make informed decisions. MAST can help consolidate land and forest resource information and provide an important platform to engage stakeholders in making critical decisions regarding their use.

[1] Id.

By Deborah Espinosa and Patrick Gallagher, USAID’s Land Technology Solutions Program

Persistent and pervasive gender inequality is a global development challenge that constrains economic growth, educational opportunities, and health outcomes. It jeopardizes food security and undermines poverty reduction strategies. The world over, some formal and many informal laws and customs operate to hinder women’s empowerment and thus their full potential as agents of economic and social change.

Arguably, in no sector are gender disparities so prevalent and disempowering to women as in the land and property rights sector. For women, documented land rights can confer direct economic benefits and lead to greater autonomy, increased bargaining power within their communities and households, and enhanced resilience. Worldwide evidence suggests that when women enjoy secure rights to land, their control over household income increases.[1]

In much of the world, however, the ownership and control of land is a source of power, prestige, and profit. Not surprisingly then, women’s ownership and control over land is almost always constrained by entrenched traditions and practices that limit women’s participation in public life, even if formal laws recognizing women’s land rights are in place.

Importantly, USAID’s new and innovative tool for documenting land rights has proved impactful in reversing these trends. USAID’s Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST) has worked to reduce gender equality and promote women’s empowerment in communities where it has been implemented. MAST is a suite of easy-to-use tools and methods that help communities efficiently, transparently and affordably map and document their land and resource rights. MAST combines a mobile application with a robust data management platform to capture and manage land information, including names and photographs of people using and occupying land, details about land used, and information regarding an occupant’s claim to the land.

Working with local governments, customary leaders, and civil society organizations, USAID is leveraging MAST to recognize and record both women and men’s rights to rural land, with positive women’s empowerment outcomes in Tanzania and Zambia.

In Tanzania, for example, although Tanzanian women comprise 50 percent of the population and provide 80 percent of total agricultural labor (a sector which employs 77 percent of Tanzanians), country data indicates that only 27 percent of women are landowners.[2] The country ranks 119th (out of 189) on the UNDP’s 2013 Gender Inequality Index. In 2018, Tanzania’s ranking has even fallen since its 2013 ranking of 130th. [3] [4]A key reason cited for Tanzania’s drop in the rankings is the persistence of gender inequalities in access to and control over land and other financial resources, and the additional burden that poverty places on Tanzanian women.[5] Another gender disparity in Tanzania is the low proportion of women in decision-making positions at regional and local government levels.[6]

And yet, four years into USAID’s MAST-based Land Tenure Assistance (LTA) Program, almost 45 percent of project beneficiaries receiving land certificates are women (see Figure 1). Similarly, under USAID’s Tenure and Global Climate Change program in Zambia, two civil society organizations, Chipata District Land Alliance (CPLA) and Petauke District Land Alliance (PDLA), used MAST to also register about 45 percent of customary land in the names of women in a country with similar traditional constraints on women.

In both of these countries, MAST’s approach has been critical in promoting gender equality and women’s empowerment in the land sector. MAST includes on-the-ground trainings, using inclusive and participatory approaches to build capacity of communities to document, manage information about, and understand their land and resource rights. The MAST approach operates transparently, encourages full participation of community members, and increases the understanding of land rights of all beneficiaries, particularly women’s rights.

To hear directly from Zambian women on their experiences obtaining land certificates, see the USAID video, In My Own Name, Empowering Women Through Secure Land Rights.

What Does the Data Say?

A gender analysis of data on individual versus collective landholdings provides further insight useful for future programming. In both Tanzania, and Zambia, more men hold land individually, while more women hold land jointly or in co-tenancy arrangements. This finding is backed by research indicating that female ownership of land is generally held together with husbands, whereas men are more likely to be sole owners of land.[7]

Despite that, men currently represent a higher proportion of individual landowners, the implementation of MAST has proven effective in promoting gender equality and empowering women by providing a technology coupled with an inclusive approach for recognizing and documenting land rights. In Zambia, land documentation had positive impact on household perceptions of improved tenure security,[8] and in Tanzania, there was an11% increase in respondents who felt that disputes over land will improve in the next year.[9]

[1] Meinzin-Dick, et al. 2017. “Women’s Land Rights As A Pathway to Poverty Reduction: Framework and Review of Available Evidence, in Agricultural Systems, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0308521X1730505X.
[2] FAO. 2014. Gender Inequalities in Rural Employment in Tanzania Mainland An Overview.
[3] UNDP. 2018. Human Development Report.
[4] UNDP. 2018. Human Development Report.
[5] UNDP. 2018. Tanzanian Human Development Report 2017: Social Policy in the Context of Economic Transformation. Tanzanian women spend 13.6 percent of their time per day on unpaid care work compared to 3.6 percent for their male counterparts. Id. As a consequence, women’s availability for income-generating activities is reduced, to the detriment of themselves and the household and local economies.
[6] Id.
[7] Land Alliance and ODI. (2017). “Prindex Analytical Report.”
[8] USAID. 2018. USAID Tenure and Global Climate Change Evaluation Report.
[9] USAID. 2017. Baseline Report: Impact Evaluation of the Feed the Future Tanzania Land Tenure Assistance Activity.  

By Deborah Espinosa and Patrick Gallagher, USAID’s Land Technology Solutions Program

There is much debate about the extent to which our prolific use of mobile technology affects our lives. While the broader debate rages on, the results on how smartphones can lead to improved development outcomes is becoming clearer. For example, a recent study in Ghana found that smallholder farmers’ mobile phone ownership and use significantly improves agricultural productivity when also combined with provision of extension services, and enhanced market participation.[1]

Land tenure and property rights is another emerging area where mobile technology can enhance development in powerful ways.  USAID’s Mobile Applications for Secure Tenure (MAST) initiative is empowering rural communities to define, map, record, and document their land and resources. MAST combines participatory approaches and mobile technology platforms with on-the-ground training to engage communities to map and document land and resource rights through efficient, transparent, and accurate processes. Significantly, these communities are applying this technology more efficiently than more traditional methods and at scale.

The MAST approach is comprised of easy-to-use mobile phone and tablet applications, combined with a robust data management platform, which captures and manages land information that can include names and photos of the people using and occupying land, details about what the land is used for, and information regarding occupants’ claims to land. In addition, on-the ground training of community members builds their capacity to document and manage information about land and resource rights, while participatory approaches ensure that communities understand those rights.

In Burkina Faso, the MAST approach proved to be roughly nine times faster than traditional methods. With MAST tools in hand, and in partnership with the community members, the country’s Rural Land Service required only four months to complete the process of mapping 2,638 parcels in four villages, with verifications averaging 30 minutes each. In comparison, using traditional methods, the same authorities mapped only 3,706 parcels over a four-year period.[2]

By working in tandem with community members—especially youth—MAST enables citizens to map and document their own land and resources in less time, while promoting community autonomy in land tenure processes. For instance, MAST has been implemented on a variety of time scales; the technology can be deployed to map an area intensely for a short time, or more gradually over longer periods of time. Paired with community ownership, this means that the technology is flexible enough to meet the needs of the community.

Efficiencies in mapping are also evident through entire certification processes in Burkina Faso, Tanzania, and Zambia, demonstrating that MAST is a scalable tool. As MAST implementations scale up, the duration between demarcation and certification shortens. MAST allows the certification process to become more efficient as time passes. In contrast, traditional processes generally do not become more efficient over time because of their reliance on older technologies, significant labor, and time-intensive manual processes.

Thus, despite MAST having higher upfront costs related to adapting or customizing the technology suite to specific land tenure context, its significant efficiency gains over time have allowed implementers to leverage mobile tools and citizen-centric approaches for replication and scaling regardless of the context. Ultimately, the MAST approach is not only a rapid and scalable tool, it also becomes more efficient over time as users become familiar with the technology. And this means that land documents get in the hands of the landholders even sooner.

[1] Haruna Issahaku, Benjamin Musah Abu & Paul Kwame Nkegbe (2018) “Does the Use of Mobile Phones by Smallholder Maize Farmers Affect Productivity in Ghana?”, Journal of African Business, 19:3, 302-322.
[2] A Mobile Application to Secure Land Tenure, Michael Graglia and Christopher Mellon, Aug. 3, 2017 (https://www.newamerica.org/future-property-rights/blog/mobile-application-secure-land-tenure/);
Issifou Ganou, Medard Some, Raymond Soumbougma, and Anne Girardin, Using Mobile Phones, GPS, and the Cloud to Deliver Faster, Cheaper, and More Transparent Land Titles: The Case of Burkina Faso. Paper prepared for presentation at the “2017 WORLD BANK CONFERENCE ON LAND AND POVERTY,” The World Bank – Washington DC, March 20-24, 2017.