Category: Uncategorized

The 2015 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty will take place at the World Bank Headquarters in Washington, D.C. on March 23 – 27, 2015. The theme of the 16th annual conference is “Linking Land Tenure and Use for Shared Prosperity.”

The conference will feature USAID’s work designing, testing and evaluating innovative and cost-effective land tenure and property rights approaches around the globe that can be adapted, scaled, or used to inform new research, program design, or national policies. New research from USAID land and resource governance impact evaluations is building an evidence base to demonstrate how secure land tenure may improve economic growth, food security, climate change mitigation and adaptation efforts, and gender equality. This work will be highlighted in the following presentations:

• Impact evaluations of projects in Liberia, Ethiopia, and Zambia;
• The gendered nature of land and property rights in post-reform Rwanda;
• Participatory rangeland management planning and implementation in Ethiopia;
• Baseline results from the impact evaluation of the Community Land Protection Program in Liberia;
• Integrating land tenure into Payment for Environmental Service (PES) schemes, such as REDD+;
• Scaling up legal assistance components of land rights projects;
• The connection between land tenure security and smallholder investment in climate-smart agriculture;
• Artisanal and small-scale mining and property rights challenges in Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, and the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As in past years, USAID will serve as a conference partner and sponsor. According to Tim Fella, USAID Senior Land and Resource Governance Specialist, “USAID invests in and is committed to the success of this annual conference because it is the premier land event, and one of the best opportunities to influence ideas and practice in property rights.”

The Conference provides an important venue to discuss and receive feedback on USAID’s land tenure work. If you are planning to attend the 2015 World Bank Conference on Land and Poverty, make sure to stop by USAID’s booth in the atrium for a hands-on demonstration of the technology being piloted by the Mobile Applications for Secure Tenure (MAST) project in Tanzania, a sneak preview of our soon-to-be launched e-newsletter, and your chance to win a printed version of the winning photo from the LTRM photo contest.

If you cannot attend, stay connected and up-to-date on USAID’s efforts to strengthen land tenure and property rights by following #LandRights on Twitter and by subscribing to USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management Media Scan.

How can land-related development programming better address GBV? As a start, interventions should include the whole community: men, women, and customary and formal governance institutions. To understand and address the challenge of GBV, projects should proactively incorporate GBV monitoring and mitigation strategies that will enable them to adapt and respond. Ultimately, such attention and research will result in better programming and a deeper understanding of the complex relationship between land rights and GBV.

What does the evidence show? Research from USAID shows that secure land rights can increase a woman’s economic independence and her bargaining power, and reduce her vulnerability to GBV – particularly in low-income, agriculture-based economies. However, the correlation between GBV and women’s land and property rights is highly variable and context- and culture-dependent. More research is needed to understand the many dimensions of this relationship, and its implications for social and economic development.

For instance, a 2005 study in Kerala, India found that women who owned their own homes had a lower risk of marital violence than women who did not own a house and land, and a later study in Uttar Pradesh concluded that “women’s ownership of property has a large effect on reducing violence.” Similarly, surveys conducted in rural Nicaragua found that land ownership among women increases women’s power and control within the marital relationship and reduces their exposure to domestic violence.

Conversely, some studies in sub-Saharan Africa found no correlation or a negative correlation between stronger land and property rights and GBV. For example, one study from Uganda attributed an increased incidence in GBV against women who owned land to strong traditional norms against women’s land ownership. The researchers found that when men felt their authority in the home was challenged, they responded with physical violence against their spouses. In Rwanda’s Eastern Province, a land dispute management project anecdotally found that women who sought to exercise their land rights, and particularly women who objected to infringement of their rights, were exposed to GBV within their families, perhaps because women’s land rights are not perceived to be legitimate by many within rural communities.

In Monrovia, Liberia, 2013 field research found a complex relationship between housing, land, and property rights and GBV. Where men controlled housing and land, they used that control over resources to physically control women. Conversely, however, if they perceived their power to be threatened or questioned, they sometimes used physical and/or sexual violence as a form of reprisal or control.

It is important for development professionals working on land issues to understand the potential for such unforeseen consequences and to take steps to ensure that programs do no harm.

What is clear is that stronger land rights for women provide an important source of income, economic independence, and bargaining power, which reduces women’s dependency on their partners and thus can reduce their risk of experiencing GBV. Studies in Bangladesh, Ecuador, and Ghana found that the effects of property ownership on GBV greatly depend on the community and cultural context: in areas where traditional norms dominate, gains in women’s property ownership and employment status seemed to increase the risk of domestic violence. Conversely, USAID’s Kenya Justice project, which educated the whole community, including traditional elders, on the importance of women’s land rights found a reduction in GBV.

Photo Contest Winner March 2015: Deborah Espinosa

The Land Tenure and Resource Management Flickr Group and Photo Contest is open! See the guidelines below for joining and submitting.

---

Land Tenure and Resource Management Flickr Group and Photo Contest

In the post-2015 sustainable development context, land tenure and property rights issues present both obstacles and solutions to our most critical development goals: addressing extreme poverty, enhancing resilience, improving food security, combatting climate change, and reducing conflict.

Your photos can help us tell us the story of how land tenure and property rights play a role in all of these important issues. Therefore, USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management (LTRM) Office is launching a contest to solicit photos that depict these important issues. Photos will be judged based on their aesthetic appeal, effectiveness in conveying a story related to land tenure and property rights, creativity, and overall impact. Contest winners will be selected by the staff of the LTRM Office.

To submit a photo, please request entry to the LTRM group on Flickr. Alternatively, photos can be submitted either by sending photos as an attachment or by saving photos in Dropbox or Google drive and then sending the link to photos@usaidlandtenure.net. There is no maximum number of photos that one person can submit. The next deadline for submissions is September 30, 2015. The contest will repeat on a regular basis.

Photos will be uploaded to Flickr and winners will be announced on social media platforms and the USAID Land Tenure and Property Rights Portal. We will notify you via email if your photo wins.

USAID has the right to reproduce your photo in ANY format, including print products, online, and in social media. Please make sure you read the disclaimer below for full details.

Submission Requirements:

• High-resolution, high quality photos that are at least 1024 x 768 pixels or larger, or around 300 pixels per inch. Please send us the highest resolution version of the photo you have (at least 1 MB). If you are using Photoshop, please send only level 7 or higher compressed photos.
• Accepted formats: high quality JPG, JPEG, PNG, and BMP
• Photos must be original (submitted by photographer or with permission)
• Photos must each include a credit: name of photographer and organizational affiliation (if applicable)
• Photos must each include a unique, robust caption, which includes a description of what is going on in the photo, who is involved, where it was taken, and how it is a part of or relates to land tenure and property rights
• Photos must also be tagged at a minimum with: date (ddmmyyyy), country, subject(s), and any relevant USAID project or program title (if applicable)

Last week, we shared an example of an innovative participatory project design in Kenya. This week, our example of an innovative participatory project design comes from Kosovo.

In Kosovo, the gap between formal legal protection of women’s property rights and actual practice remains large. To address this gap and help support women’s claims to land and other property, USAID is using participatory approaches in the design of a strategic social and behavior change communication campaign. The campaign aims to shift attitudes and actions around women’s land rights and increase women’s ability to access and own property. Although formal laws and clear enforcement procedures protect women’s rights to land and other property, behavioral barriers—including strong cultural pressures for women to renounce family inheritances—prevent women from acquiring property in practice. To better understand the experiences of those affected and to create behavior change communication interventions that will resonate with the public, the design of USAID’s campaign includes target audiences, women’s organizations, and other key players in the property rights space—giving voice to marginalized groups and building local ownership and sustainability of the program.

During the initial phase of the project, USAID convened a participatory consultation workshop with key stakeholders to listen to local experience, segment and prioritize audiences, analyze needed changes in knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors, and identify key messages that will help reduce pressures on women to renounce their family inheritance. The workshop was also an opportunity for participants to share communications lessons learned and research results, and identify broad gaps in knowledge. Feedback from participants informed the design of a Knowledge, Attitudes, and Practices Survey targeting key campaign audiences, which, when launched, will be used to further understand audience experiences, barriers to change, and behavioral incentives—all critical information that will enable the program to bring audiences toward the “tipping point” for change.

USAID will be working across the country with a broad network of community-based civil society and non-governmental organizations to build their capacity to design, lead, and implement this important campaign to better ensure local ownership, sustainability, and the accuracy, relatability, and effectiveness of messaging.