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Guest commentary by Paul Munro-Faure, Deputy Director, Climate, Energy and Tenure Division, FAO, Andrew Hilton and David Palmer, Senior Land Tenure Officers, FAO.

October is a month that is closely linked to food security. The Committee on World Food Security (CFS), the UN forum for policies concerning food security, holds its 42nd session during October 12-15. At its 38th session in 2012, CFS formally endorsed the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure of Land, Fisheries and Forests in the Context of National Food Security. These Guidelines were negotiated by governments from all regions of the world with the participation of civil society and the private sector, through the forum of CFS, following a global consultation process led by FAO, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

October 16 commemorates World Food Day, which this year marks the 70th anniversary of the founding of FAO. Land tenure, along with many other factors, was linked to the goal of freedom from want of food at a conference in the USA in 1943, which committed to the founding of a permanent organization for food and agriculture. An interim commission then laid the groundwork for FAO, which was based in Washington, D.C., until its headquarters were moved to Rome, Italy in 1951.

On World Food Day this year, the UN Secretary-General and the FAO Director-General will be joined by the President of Italy and the Italian Ministers for Agriculture and Foreign Affairs for the official celebration at Expo Milano. The theme for the international Expo is fitting: “Feeding the planet, energy for life”. The Expo, which opened in May and closes at the end of October, provides a location for confronting the issues of agriculture, sustainable development and the struggle to combat hunger. A number of its events have featured aspects of land tenure, such as the importance of secure tenure rights for women and the dangers of people losing their tenure rights, for example through agricultural investments that lack appropriate safeguards.

The Voluntary Guidelines on tenure have now become the globally-accepted standard for improving the governance of tenure for all, with an emphasis on vulnerable and marginalized people. While the guidelines were prepared in the context in food security, they also contribute to other development goals, including poverty eradication, sustainable livelihoods, women’s tenure rights, social stability, housing security, rural development, environmental protection and sustainable social and economic development.

The guidelines provide a framework that can be used by governments, civil society, private sector, citizens and philanthropic foundations. They are providing guidance to the Global Donor Working Group on Land, where FAO is collaborating with USAID and other bilateral and multilateral members to improve coordination and the sharing of information on efforts to improve the governance of tenure. This working group meets on 16 October, at IFAD in Rome, as part of its regular program of bi-annual meetings to progress its work plan, which includes during the current period supporting four studies on: i) Open data, innovative technology-based solutions for better land governance; ii) Successful models for partnerships between developed and developing/emerging countries for better land governance; iii) The most promising tools for donors to help make good land governance into a corporate performance standard; and iv) Effective approaches to strengthen coherence across donor governments regarding good practice in land governance. The Working Group is also supporting technical meetings on 14 and 15 October to discuss, respectively, the promotion of the Voluntary Guidelines and their integration into donor supported activities and the alignment of the Land Governance Assessment Framework (LGAF) and other assessment tools with VGGT implementation at country level.

The guidelines are now being used by a wide number of organizations, including FAO and USAID, in their own programs.

As a framework for improving tenure and its governance, the guidelines are expected to be the key reference for work on tenure in support of the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals, which were formally adopted by the General Assembly of the UN in New York on 25 September.

For investors seeking to purchase, lease or access large areas of land in developing countries, understanding the complex land tenure realities – who has what rights or claims to which pieces of land – can be the difference between a failed investment and a successful, responsible one. Failing to account for or adequately compensate individuals or communities with claims to land that is slated for investment can lead to displacements or loss of livelihoods for local people and communities, and can create significant financial or reputational risks for the investor as well. For investors, conducting proper due diligence and structuring responsible land-based investments to account for all stakeholders can be extremely complex in situations where rights to land are unclear, undocumented, overlapping, or poorly enforced – which is often the case in developing countries.

For these reasons, a group of development organizations, under the leadership of Grow Africa and the New Alliance for Food Security and Nutrition, have released a new tool to help investors better understand risks related to land-based investments and manage them responsibly: the Analytical Framework for Investors Under the New Alliance. The Analytical Framework is designed to help investors identify practical steps to align their policies and actions with global best practices and relevant international guidelines, such as the Voluntary Guidelines on the Responsible Governance of Tenure (VGGT) and the UN Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights (also known as the Ruggie Principles), and the African Union’s Guiding Principles on Large-Scale Land Based Investments.

Along with a range of other bilateral and multilateral development partners, USAID played a key role in developing the Analytical Framework through a collaborative multi-stakeholder process. USAID’s Operational Guidelines for Responsible Land-Based Investment form the basis of many of the recommendations in the Analytical Framework.

As a next step, Grow Africa is seeking interested companies to pilot the framework in actual investments projects in Africa to determine their effectiveness. Please contact Grow Africa at info@growafrica.com if your firm is interested in participating in this pilot.

By Heath Cosgrove, Director, USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management Office.

Land tenure and property rights are at the heart of our most pressing development issues. Globally, there are more than 500 land governance programs in approximately 100 countries that recognize land rights as foundational for development work. These programs are expected to increase in the coming years because a growing body of evidence demonstrates that more secure rights to land and resources have powerful impacts on ending extreme poverty, promoting women’s empowerment, improving food security, reducing conflict, protecting biodiversity and responding to climate change. For development practitioners, better understanding and incorporating land tenure into existing and future development programming is crucial to achieving our objectives across a variety of sectors, such as agriculture, democracy and governance, environment, urban development, economic growth and disaster risk resilience.

To improve understanding of this critical issue, USAID is announcing the launch of the first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on land tenure and property rights. This free course is open to the public and provides a 14-week introduction to land tenure and property rights and their critical role in international development work.

Starting September 14 and running until the end of 2015, the MOOC features lectures from leading researchers and practitioners – including experts from Yale University, Michigan State University, the International Organization for Migration, USAID, and others – presenting theories, evidence and best practices related to property rights in real-world settings. The course also examines case studies in Colombia, Haiti and Tanzania. Participants in the course will receive a certificate upon completion.

The MOOC was developed by USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management Office to help promote effective, accessible, and responsive land governance systems for all members of society. USAID developed this course because when it comes to understanding the myriad complex challenges created by insecure land rights–and the evidenced-based global best practices for addressing them–there has not been a shared education tool to guide development practitioners at the programmatic level until now.

Land tenure and secure property rights can be challenging issues for development practitioners across various sectors to understand and address because throughout much of the developing world rights to land and other resources are often unclear and poorly enforced. Importantly, up to 70% of land in the developing world is unregistered. In many countries, these rights are governed by complex and overlapping systems of formal laws and informal customs.

Better understanding of these systems and their implications on economic growth, food security, women’s empowerment and natural resource management can improve development programming across a range of important topics. Secure property rights change how people interact with other people and with land itself. These rights can be the tipping point as to whether farmers are willing to adopt costly multi-year agriculture programs. The ability for women to inherit and own property can be the gateway to greater gender equality. Land issues have played a major role in 27 conflicts in Africa since 1990 and have been recognized by the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) as international priorities. USAID’s new Land Tenure and Property Rights MOOC provides a valuable tool to understand these linkages and to improve development outcomes. I encourage you to join us and learn about this key development topic.

From securing women’s inheritance rights, to enabling more responsible agricultural investment, to making cities more resilient to disasters—a growing body of evidence indicates that the systems that govern land and property rights have a significant impact on a wide range of critical development issues. Land tenure and property rights are particularly important to vulnerable groups such as women, indigenous peoples, refugees, internally displaced peoples, and the poor. But one vulnerable group has received less attention when it comes to land rights: youth.

Available evidence suggests that youth face significant and unique challenges when it comes to land and property. In many countries, rising pressures on land have left youth increasingly landless or holding only informal or secondary rights to land. This can lead to higher instances of conflict. In Ethiopia, for example, youth are more likely to experience land-related conflict than the general population. A lack of youth access to land may be a contributing factor to the civil wars in both Sierra Leone and Liberia.

Additionally, it should be noted that definitions of ‘youth’ vary widely across countries and can include individuals up to 35 years of age – in some countries the transition to adulthood requires marriage and children.

Recent research is building evidence of the impact of land tenure and property rights on youth. The International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) has pointed out that landlessness among rural youth is one of the primary causes of migration to urban areas as young people seek out alternative sources of income. New research from USAID has begun to examine the impact of perceptions of land tenure security on youth and other vulnerable populations in Ethiopia, Guinea, Liberia and Zambia.

While more research is needed, initial findings indicate that policy makers and development practitioners engaged in land programming should take note of the unique challenges faced by youth. Policies and programs should take steps to promote youth land access and ensure that policies do not disadvantage youth with respect to land.

Download the full paper research paper from USAID.