USAID promotes the participation of women in agricultural production in Montes de María.
Luz Mery Valdez is an iconic woman, who is defying gender stereotypes through her work as a cassava and yam farmer in the Montes de María region of Colombia. She works with the Association of United Women of San Isidro (AMUSI) in the municipality of El Carmen de Bolívar.
USAID, through its Land for Prosperity Activity, is supporting the departments of Bolívar and Sucre in the Montes de María with land tenure programming and rural development initiatives. The Activity established a series of Public-Private Partnerships (PPP) in the sesame, honey, yam and cassava value chains to shore up investments in agribusiness, improve yields, and bring more women into the value chain. So far, almost 400 rural women have benefited from the PPPs.
How has your experience growing cassava and yam been, since you joined the Public-Private Partnership?
LM: My experience has been great, as we have been able to regain the recognition that women can also participate in agriculture activities, which is something that had been lost.
What was the reaction of the men around you, when you joined this agribusiness?
LM: At the beginning when we started growing yam, the men found it unusual. To see women growing yam and cassava in the countryside is just not very common in our region. Then we started to get more involved in all of the process, to learn more about the business. We are reclaiming a space for women that we deserve.
What have been the most visible changes since women have participated in farming activities?
LM: The vision that women have today is very different to the one we had a few years ago. Now we think about agriculture production, about generating income for our families, and about strengthening our cultural bonds as women.
How do the men of your community see you now?
LM: Men see us in a different way, I think, at least when it comes to our farmers association, the Association of United Women of San Isidro, which sees itself as a women’s association that strives to increase income for its members. Thanks to USAID programs, we can achieve this, specializing in the production of cassava and yam.
What would you say to other women?
LM: I would tell them that they have to believe, believe in themselves, have goals, and achieve them. It was not easy when we started, because women see things from a different point of view than men. It may be difficult to participate in farming, but it is not impossible. What we have to do is believe and have goals with objectives so we can achieve them.
“To rural women I would say that it might be difficult but not impossible. Every day you have to get up thinking that you can do it, to move forward.”
Luz Mery Valdez, cassava and yam producer.
As part of the 16 days of activism to end violence against women and girls, LFP talked to Judith Rodríguez, a member of 
In the Community Council, you share the land between members. Do you think the women who own land individually or jointly with their partners are as protected as you?
There are laws to stop men from selling common properties without the consent of their partners. Do you think there is a need to talk about these laws more widely? 
One early morning in 1994, Gloria Ester Buelvas was woken and told she had to leave her grandfather’s farm in San Pedro de Urabá, where she had lived 16 years of her life. Nearly three decades later, Buelvas still does not know why she and dozens of members of her family were threatened and forced to leave their hometown.
Colombia’s Urabá region stretches from the border of Panama along the Caribbean coast and is famous for bananas and large cattle ranching estates. Over generations, the region became a textbook example of the type of class divisions between landless farmers and an elite land-owning class that fomented strife and erupted in brazen warfare between the leftist guerrillas and paramilitary groups in the nineties. Families like the Buelvas were caught in the middle, accused of helping or supporting one side or the other.
Over the years, the municipality provided relief, including improved roads and electricity, and the families rebuilt their lives. Gloria and her neighbors supported each other through subsistence agriculture, but none have ever obtained a land title for their property. 
When the cadaster of Puerto Lleras was last updated in 2011, it included 2,300 properties. Following the implementation of the 2023 POSPR, the initiative surveyed over 4,600 properties, many of which are home to displaced families. More than half of these parcels are not recognized by the state but are ready to be formalized and issued a registered land title.
Puerto Lleras is one of 
USAID is promoting an innovative land administration strategy that supports the creation of Regional Land Offices (RLOs) in partnership with regional governments across Colombia. RLOs address issues of land formalization in municipalities with limited resources. RLO land formalization teams, which include a land surveyor and legal expert, rotates around the department, working in municipalities where local leaders have limited budgets and experience with titling property. The strategy takes advantage of economies of scale, allowing municipal leaders to share costs, and strengthens land use planning between municipal and regional leaders. RLOs interface with Colombia’s property registry authority, the Superintendence of Notaries and Registers, which is often located far from rural municipalities. They also assist with the titling of properties in urban areas, including public properties with schools and health centers, and provide technical assistance and training.
At the event, regional leaders delivered 146 land titles to landowners in the municipalities of Arjona, Calamar, Cartagena, El Carmen de Bolívar, Magangué, Mahates, María la Baja, San Jacinto, San Juan Nepomuceno, Santa Rosa del Sur, and Simití. RLOs ensure gender equality and a total of 108 land titles benefited women. The Bolívar RLO plays a central role in the Departmental Land Working Group, which coordinates tasks related to land administration and property formalization in the department in efforts to increase the efficiency of land titling and promote a culture of formal land ownership.
W.R: A well-organized office brings people closer to the habits of legal land ownership so that their land titles can be passed from generation to generation and from owner to owner. It is an invitation to the community to align itself with the office, to resolve their doubts with clear and accurate information, and to learn how to do land transactions moving forward.
J.V: Without a doubt it can and will be over time. The Bolivar Regional Land Office is a strategic ally to reach each of the municipalities and the villages in corregimientos, and veredas in Bolívar. I believe the office is the critical link to continue formalizing land and properties, and to convert registered property titles into a positive habit of the community.
Fuentedeoro is known for plantains. The municipality is located in Colombia’s eastern plains, a vast region of large rivers that drain the Andes into the Amazon basin. In this landscape, Luz Dary Mendoza learned farming from her father, who grew a variety of crops in the fertile plains. But his livelihood and family’s future always depended on the revenue generated from the region’s cash crop: the plantain.
The Rural Property and Land Use Plan, known by its Spanish acronym POSPR, seeks to change this paradigm. The initiative, which surveys and updates the cadaster for every parcel in the municipality, was recently carried out by Colombia’s National Land Agency with USAID support. Land formalization teams surveyed almost 4,500 rural parcels, covering Fuentedeoro’s more than 56,000 hectares. The land administration plan discovered that some 2,000 plots are ready to be formalized. Among these plots are the farms of Luz Dary Mendoza and 19 AGROSARDI members.
Under Luz Dary’s leadership, AGROSARDI joined a Public-Private Partnership (PPP) focused on plantain agribusiness. The PPP, which was facilitated by USAID Land for Prosperity, is valued at more than USD $250,000 and links critical investments from the public and private sectors to nearly 200 plantain farmers in and around Fuentedeoro.
Thanks to the plantain PPP, farmers are learning Good Agricultural Practices (GAP). AGROSARDI will generate cleaner, agrochemical-free crops. GAP also promotes soil recovery through the use of organic fertilizers, resulting in cleaner plantain suitable for human consumption.
The invasion occurred in 2010, and Jairo Gómez was there. He was one of a multitude of victims and families displaced by the violence that had engulfed their region and pushed them out of their homes. Gómez pounded in wooden posts, hung a tarp and hammock, and braced himself for the inevitable backlash. In less than a week, the police showed up with teargas and violence to evict the families. Gómez stood his ground.
Social leaders emerged, and soon they were laying lines to create the lots for dwellings and future roads. By the end of the first year, 5,000 people lived in 9 de Agosto, which anywhere else was known as the barrio de los desplazados, or displaced people.
This year, with USAID support Tierralta made a giant step towards incorporating the neighborhood into the town’s masterplan by titling more than 260 parcels. The event featured Mayor Daniel Montero delivering property titles to a packed auditorium, and was significant on several levels. First, as a clear example of the government providing families with a tangible asset that will inevitably lead to improvements in their neighborhood; second, the event represents the single largest delivery of land titles made by a municipal administration in the history of Colombia. “The wait times for government services are slow and you can never get everything done, but today we have fought for something beautiful,” Montero said to the crowd. “A land title will bring you new opportunities and hopefully bring peace, happiness, and hope to your homes.”
The Colombian government has struggled to facilitate land planning in areas affected by the conflict or to provide residents with services to legalize the properties of informal settlements like 9 de Agosto.
With USAID’s support, Tierralta’s Municipal Land Office has improved its capacity to title urban property and reduced processing times from multiple years to just a few months. Key to the process is the improvement in communication and work flow between land agencies, or in this case with Colombia’s property registry authority, the Superintendence of Notaries and Registers (SNR). By working directly with the regional SNR office, Tierralta’s Land Office can title dozens of properties at a time.
Since 2020, 42 USAID-supported Municipal and Regional Land Offices delivered over 6,800 land titles to families living in the urban areas of rural municipalities. In addition, the land offices have formalized more than 1,600 public properties and provided land and property services to more than 16,000 citizens.