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With USAID support, Colombia’s National Land Agency made history by adopting guidelines to approach families who cultivate illicit crops like coca with land titling services.
Cáceres, Antioquia is famous for all the wrong reasons. The municipality, which is home to more than 30,000 people in the lower Cauca river basin, is known for harsh violence, illegal mining, and criminal groups fighting for control of land. Nearly half of the population is registered as victims of Colombia’s protracted conflict, and after compiling more than 200 land restitution applications, the government’s Land Restitution Unit suspended its work due to inherent risk.

In Cáceres, where an estimated 8 of 10 parcels lack land titles or official documentation, land rights are weak. The culture of informal land ownership is pervasive and the reasons are many: one, beyond the municipality’s urban center, the Colombian government has never had much presence in rural villages; and two, families who may have once held land titles for their land, have since inherited land to their children and grandchildren, reverting to informal land ownership.

On top of this, the municipality is home to more than 1,000 hectares of coca crops.

For the last decade, Cáceres has been of strategic importance to USAID and the government, and this attention has led to a cluster of initiatives and joint efforts in the territory. Perhaps the most important of these is a current municipality-wide land formalization campaign overseen by Colombia’s National Land Agency (ANT). With USAID financing and technical support, the government is poised to title more than 2,000 parcels, update the cadaster for the 10,000 plus parcels in the municipality’s cadaster, and build local capacity to maintain an operable land market. But, in its endeavour to title every parcel in Cáceres, the Agency is on a collision course with coca crops and is adapting its land governance strategy to offer land titles as an incentive for illicit crop substitution.

The USAID-funded Land for Prosperity Activity and the ANT are working with the National Program for the Substitution of Illicit Crops (PNIS) and the Agency for Territorial Renovation (ART) to craft the road map and implement land formalization plans in the context of illicit crop cultivation. Earlier this year, the ANT made history when they adopted guidelines that enable the government to approach families who cultivate illicit crops like coca with land administration services like titling.

Illicit Crop Guidelines

The guidelines recently adopted by the ANT for titling parcels with the presence of illicit crops include the following:

• Promote and ensure cooperation among government agencies
• Guarantee the inclusion of all parcels with illicit crops
• Consider environmental issues and ethnic populations
• Communicate transparently with communities
• Report security conditions and illegal activity to corresponding government agencies
• Establish monitoring and evaluation mechanisms following the titling process

The new guidelines are centered on a philosophy of “do-no-harm” and within its main principles are government cooperation, ethnic group inclusion, and community dialogue. The adoption of the guidelines is remarkable, however, because it marks the first time the Colombian government has formally accepted a strategy that considers formalizing land rights as an incentive to reduce illicit cropping.

USAID is supporting massive land formalization campaigns in an additional four municipalities with the presence of illicit crops. In Tumaco, Nariño, the campaign’s social awareness component is already underway, and the work plans are still in development for Sardinata, Norte de Santander, Santander de Quilichao, Cauca, and Puerto Rico, Meta. Together, the four municipalities represent more than 14,000 hectares of illicit crops.

In many ways, the initial experience working with families and farmers and titling parcels with illicit crops in Cáceres will provide lessons and modifications for the strategy in the other four municipalities.

“This is an opportunity to demonstrate that property formalization can be an incentive for substituting illicit crops, and we will see the challenges around inter- agency teamwork and cooperation. What we learn from Cáceres about crop substitution and land titling will help us shape the strategy in Tumaco. Both municipalities are complex, and each has its own context.”     – Natali Buitrago, the project manager of the massive land formalization campaign in Cáceres and Tumaco.

 

 

 

 

“Land titles are long term assets that provide families access to public and private resources aimed at rural landowners and allow the government the additional benefit of managing land use and organizing land for rural development that maintains an environmental balance.” – Hernando Londoño, Director of Illicit Crop Substitution at the Agency for Territorial Renovation

Footnotes
Photos by USAID and GoC
Colombia
© 2022 Land for Prosperity

In Sardinata, Colombia, women are the driving force behind land formalization and are the main beneficiaries

For the women of Sardinata, Norte de Santander, having a land title had been unimaginable for decades. Their dreams of owning property were crushed every time unscrupulous people arrived with false promises.

“People came here and told us things, made us spend money, but in the end, nothing ever came out of it,” according to Belcy Veloza, a woman from Sardinata’s El Baho barrio.

In Catatumbo, a complex region in Norte de Santander where Sardinata is located, half of the properties are informal. This fact—coupled with the large presence of illicit crops, armed groups, and anti-personnel landmines—has hindered the arrival of the peace this region has been craving for years. In addition, a limited presence of the State has resulted in a community who distrust government actions to combat violence and promote economic development.

In 2021, when the Municipal Land Office (MLO) team arrived in El Baho to begin the property characterization process, they initially contacted Hernando Gómez, Belcy’s husband and vice-president of the Community Action Board. At that moment, inspired by the possibilities of formalization, Belcy volunteered to join the team in visiting each of her neighbors’ properties—neighbors she has known since she and her husband arrived in the area 25 years ago.

Since then, Belcy has played a leading role from start to finish in the urban land formalization process in Sardinata, which has turned 140 families into legal owners of the homes they have lived in for years.

“It motivated me because I saw that it was a serious project—they weren’t trying to pull a fast one on us. That is why I also wanted to be part of the Multipliers Network, because I wanted to be a guide for the program, for the MLO, and help many families in my neighborhood,” added Belcy.

For her, the process does not end with a property title. Learning about the benefits of maintaining formality in land transactions—both for citizens and for the municipality—inspired her to invite her neighbors to be part of the Multipliers Network. Belcy wanted to spread her knowledge of the culture of formality to the entire community, especially among women.

“It is not only men who need to be concerned about getting the title to their property. Women are also part of this process, as both they and their children become owners of the property.”
Belcy Veloza, Community leader from Sardinata

Women play an invaluable role

Sardinata is one of the municipalities prioritized by the Government of Colombia and USAID to implement the massive land formalization strategy in the country. Launching the MLO in Sardinata was the first step on the road to formalization in this municipality. USAID and the municipal mayor’s office launched the MLO in October 2020, and over one year later, it has already shown results.

“The USAID Land for Prosperity Activity is one of Sardinata’s great achievements in recent decades. People have the possibility of obtaining a property title that will guarantee them access to credit. Registered land titles provide them legal security in terms of the possession of their properties.”

The mayor is aware that a successful formalization strategy in the municipality would not have been possible without the support of the community and, to a large extent, the women. For years, Sardinata had been hoping to achieve massive land titling, and he wanted to be remembered as the mayor who supported this initiative.

“Women’s support in this process is invaluable. Mrs. Belcy was an icon in El Baho for the support she gave to the Municipal Office. When she received that property title and held it in her hands, I remember seeing the happiness in her face. Women have played a very important role in this project,” the mayor emphasized.

More and more women citizens are becoming interested in land issues in Sardinata. Of the 470 women in Catatumbo who have been trained on the culture of formality, 390 are from this municipality. Interest in claiming their land rights has grown so much that 102 of the 140 urban property titles issued by the MLO are in women’s names.

Training women on the culture of formality helps many more of them become owners of their own land, take advantage of opportunities to increase their income (not clear how), and thus improve their children’s nutrition and their families’ living conditions. Keeping land in the formal market provides sustainability to these households.

 

 

 

 

7 of 10 urban property titles issued by the MLO are in women’s names.

Formalization for Rural Land

Deploying this formalization strategy in the rural areas of a municipality that has 8,000 rural properties—half of them informal—is an ambitious task. In addition, there are 4,602 hectares of illicit crops in Sardinata. This results in the need to adapt the parcel sweep for formalization using methodologies that promote voluntary crop substitution. This way, the communities themselves will be the most interested in developing licit activities on the lands that will eventually become their property after formalization.

“With the parcel sweep, the municipality’s finances will be improved, and the community will be even more rooted in their properties. We are a pilot project in Norte de Santander, and it was USAID and the national government’s decision to support us as a municipality. Farmers should be aware that with the property titles they receive, they must use their land for legal, licit economic production. Property sweeps are costly, and decades ago, the thought of this was not even a remote possibility,” stated Hermides Moncada.

Property titles that were once a dream for many of these women are now a reality.

 

 

 

 

 

Sardinata, North Santander, Colombia
© 2022 Land for Prosperity

Cross posted from Land for Prosperity Exposure site

USAID-supported local land offices are leading land administration campaigns and delivering land titles to rural Colombians

When Nuri Jaramillo won three million pesos in the lottery she wondered if it was a bad omen. She chose the number 666 for the winning lottery ticket. She used the winnings to buy clothing for her three children and then invested in the small store that she set up inside her home in the town of Cáceres, located in north-central Colombia. Through a barred window, she served customers groceries, snacks, and sodas.

“My store was full. It was proof that I had worked hard and achieved something for me and my family,” says Nuri.

The dream ended in 2018 when men from the Clan del Golfo—an ex-paramilitary group involved in drug trafficking—killed a neighbor and then drove her family away, fearing she could have witnessed the massacre. In a matter of minutes, Nuri and her children escaped, still barefoot, and then walked over 50 kilometers to the neighboring municipality of El Bagre.

The men invaded Nuri’s house and ransacked the store. The groceries kept them fed for months. Some of the men moved into her home. On the shutter of the window where she sold candies to neighborhood children, the men wrote ‘you cannot live here’ in stark, white spray paint. The words kept Nuri and her family away for three years and reminded the rest of the neighborhood that in a place like Cáceres owning a home can be unpredictable, and above all, that everything can disappear in a moment’s notice

Who Owns What?

The urban center of Cáceres is home to more than 5,000 people, but the majority has no registered land title for their property. In fact, most of the land in town is said to belong to either the local dioceses of the Catholic Church or to an ex-mayor. The latter bought 415 hectares in 2005 and a decade later was investigated for fraud. His property Candilejas is like a mysterious celebrity, i.e. most neighbors know of the property, but none are sure exactly where it lies.

The problem is that Cáceres has no reliable cadaster—or plot map. The cadaster used by the Colombian Government has not been updated for 17 years. As a result, much of the truth about land ownership is based on word of mouth and on knowledge passed from parents to children or from door to door. Sometimes a property’s perimeter is nothing more than an educated guess.

“There could be one thousand landowners living in Candilejas,” explains Wilmer Molina, the social worker employed by the Caceres Municipal Land Office. “This town has no working property map. Why? Because that is usually the most costly part of the process. Land surveys require a budget, and none of the municipalities in Bajo Cauca can afford it.”

A History of Violence

Bajo Cauca is the name of the sub-region located in the upper reaches of the department of Antioquia and includes the municipalities Cáceres, Tarazá, El Bagre, Zaragoza, Nechi, and the sub-region’s main city, Caucasia. Since the early 90s, Bajo Cauca has been a caricature of Colombia’s conflict: leftist guerrillas, paramilitaries, and narco-trafficking groups have all roamed and controlled the green hills and valleys surrounding the Cauca River. The groups, who sometimes work together, also fight violent turf wars. They rely on artisanal gold mining and drug trafficking for financing and use violence and displacement as tools of control.

In Bajo Cauca, times of peace come in small increments.

Under these conditions, the last thirty years have seen large portions of Cáceres territory bought and sold, and ultimately ending up in the hands of fewer and fewer people. Underlying the accumulation of land is violence, which has displaced the majority of Caceres’ population, some more than once. Just in the last three years, over 1,500 families have fled their homes.

Putting it on the Map

The Caceres Municipal Land Office is slowly trying to change this situation. Embedded in the municipal administration, the land office is the most effective tool for clearing up historical confusion around land ownership in the urban areas of Cáceres. With support from the mayor and financial support from USAID, social worker Wilmer Molina and the land office’s legal expert, Carlos Ávila, are following through on a strategy that expects to formalize hundreds of urban properties, not to mention dozens of public properties like schools, health clinics, and parks.

Molina and Ávila are the boots-on-the-ground team and play a critical role in facilitating the work of Colombia’s land administration agencies. Over the last year, the duo has studied a universe of more than 3,300 parcels subject to titling. By analyzing historical data, they determined that approximately one of every three properties is actually owned by the ex-mayor. After filtering the Candilejas properties, they analyzed the remaining properties according to whether they have been registered and whether the owners were still living on the property or in the area. The analysis yielded some 300 properties with the conditions to be formalized.

From the heart of Cáceres, the Municipal Land Office is steering the ship: preparing the paperwork and triangulating formalization procedures with notaries, judges, the IGAC, and finally, with the National Land Agency (ANT) and Colombia’s national land registry (SNR). In Colombia’s complicated land formalization processes, each of these stakeholders is instrumental in legalizing and formalizing urban properties.

More important for neighbors like Nuri Jaramillo, Molina and Ávila are the face of land administration. Most of the people living in the region of Bajo Cauca lack either the means to travel to the nearest land registry office or to Bogotá or lack the basic understanding of how land is titled under Colombia’s arcane laws. It was Wilmer Molina who brought land administration services to Nuri Jaramillo, first by way of the property analyses and then through the office’s social outreach strategy.

Through visits, Molina learned that years before that frightening night when she and her family were chased away from their home, Nuri Jaramillo had tried to formalize her property. When she purchased the property in 1993, she immediately went and legalized it with Colombia’s cadaster management authority, known as the IGAC. However, when she tried to process her land title, it was too costly and too difficult to muster.

Sleepless Nights

Nuri Jaramillo returned to her home in early 2021. Most of the furniture had been taken, and the entryway door jamb was destroyed. As she cautiously settled back into her home, the Municipal Land Office began formalizing the property. In July 2021, she was one of the first 40 residents of Cáceres to receive a land title, free of cost, through the local government.

In March 2022, the mayor and the Cáceres Land Office delivered another 54 land titles. Meanwhile, they continue to study the histories of properties in Cáceres. Molina and Ávila are quickly discovering that each property has its own story, which must be studied and legally documented.

“Some of these families have waited 40 years to have a land title that accredits them as registered property owners, and we have achieved that thanks to the Municipal Land Office. A land title is a fundamental aspect of guaranteeing the patrimony of home ownership.”

Despite having her land title, Nuri Jaramillo still has not spent a night in her home. The trauma of being attacked and displaced has affected her entire family. Every night, she gathers her children and walks down the street to sleep at a friend’s house. She has restocked her store and painted the window’s shutter with a couple words of her own: open for business.

“Maybe I still can’t sleep here, but now I have my land title and to the men who told me that I can’t live here, I say ‘yes, I can live here’, because this is my house.

Footnotes
USAID Land for Prosperity
Cáceres, Antioquia, Colombia
© 2022 Land for Prosperity

Cross posted from Land for Prosperity Exposure site

How Tumaco is overcoming legal and cultural barriers to formalize properties

Tumaco’s Municipal Land Office (MLO) is celebrating five years of operation and Nidia Díaz, who works as a local land administrator, has been there since the beginning. She remembers that in the beginning, the MLO was not as successful as they had hoped.

“The office was far from the people and had no advertising”, she says. People did not know about the land office or understand what services it provided. So in 2020, when the office was relocated to be closer to its users, the story changed.

 

 

 

 

Each day, the Municipal Land Offices receives dozens of visitors searching for information on how to formalize ownership of their properties.

Municipal Land Offices are part of a USAID strategy to develop the capacity of municipal governments in land administration and promote a culture of formal land markets. Local land offices provide citizens with information and work directly with Colombia’s land entities like the National Land Agency to formalize urban parcels and public property. Since 2020, the Land for Prosperity Activity, financed by USAID, has launched or relaunched 20 of these offices around the country.

In October 2020, USAID partnered with Tumaco’s municipal leaders to relaunch the MLO in the city’s new Integrated Service Center, located close to downtown. Now the MLO sits next to other important services for citizens and is visible to hundreds of people every day.

Since its relaunch, the Tumaco MLO has delivered 142 property titles to families living in urban neighborhoods. In addition, the office has provided training related to land formalization and administration for over 1,850 citizens. The MLO has also formalized 10 public entities including schools and health centers.

“Now we are better organized, we divide responsibilities and are more effective. We provide good user support, and the processes are more efficient, mostly because we have a vision and compass,” says Nidia Díaz.

Through the Land for Prosperity Activity, the MLO hired more staff and trained the entire team so they can improve services, outreach, and guide citizens through the process of titling their properties. Today, Tumaco’s MLO has 10 staff members, including land surveyors, cadastral engineers, social workers, and lawyers.

“Thanks to USAID’s support, I have seen the MLO grow. They have trained us with technical skills so we can provide quality services, both virtually and in-person.”

Cultural Barriers

In Tumaco, the Municipal Land Office also faces cultural barriers. Due to a history of violence linked to drug trafficking, the community has reservations when it comes to giving out their information, even when it is to municipal leaders. To combat this, the office holds workshops to raise awareness about formal land ownership.

“During these workshops, we can show people the importance of titling their parcels. There are a lot of people who have heard rumors and think that if they title their land, the government will take away their houses or their subsidies, and we tell them that is not true,” says Hugo Lopez, the office manager.

Since the relaunch of the MLO in Tumaco, 46 culture of formality workshops have been held, in which more than 1.640 people participated.

 

 

 

 

Employees from Tumaco’s Land Office follow up with landowners during the process of titling urban properties.

A Dream Come True

The MLO also leads outreach sessions called MLO in Your Neighborhood, where staff spend a whole day in one neighborhood answering questions, dispelling doubts, and collecting documents from the local residents who want to title their parcels. Once documents that prove they occupy their residence are submitted, MLO staff help residents fill out the forms and look for their cadastral information so they can immediately start the titling process.

Gloria Criollo, 53, is a single mother of three who works for a government program supporting pregnant women, nursing mothers, and children under the age of two. One of her neighbors told her about the land titling sessions in her neighborhood, Union Victoria.

In September 2021, a total of 45 families, some of whom have lived in the neighborhood for decades, received their land titles, at a municipal event led by Tumaco’s mayor. Most of the people interested in titling their properties are women heads of households like Gloria. Thanks to the work of the MLO disseminating information and providing training, they now understand the importance of being owners, so they have something their children can inherit.

“The USAID Land for Prosperity Activity has been very important for me and my family. Now I feel like I have have a house of my own that my children can inherit.” -Gloria Criollo, landowner in Tumaco.

 

 

 

 

Tumaco’s mayor, María Emilson Angulo, delivers property titles to residents of Tumaco in 2021.

“It is a joy to have this title. They told us that with it we can get bank loans. My dream is to finish building the front garden and the backyard and finish some work inside because we have had a lot of rain and we have water leaks.” Gloria Criollo

USAID and the Government of Colombia plan to begin implementation of a massive parcel sweep in Tumaco, which will formalize the entire rural area of the district. The MLO is supporting this process and provides the the local link between the municipal administration, USAID specialists, and Colombia’s National Land Agency. The MLO has already supported dissemination and social mapping sessions, in preparation for the massive formalization campaign.

“Tumaco won the lottery with the parcel sweep. For many years this region has suffered because of the armed conflict and national institutions have abandoned farmer families. But with the parcel sweep, they will be able to have their titles, improve their quality of life, and have credibility. Here, the true beneficiaries will be the farmers and the families from Tumaco.”
-Hugo Lopez, coordinator of the Municipal Land Office, Tumaco.

Footnotes
Photos by LFP/USAID
Tumaco, San Andres de Tumaco, Narino, Colombia
© 2022 Land for Prosperity

Cross posted from Land for Prosperity Exposure site

Gender equality initiatives are giving women in rural Tumaco an opportunity in Colombia’s cacao value chain and the means to transform their communities

“You can’t go if lunch is not ready.”
“Where are you going? Your place is at home with the kids.”

These are some of the things that women in a rural village of Tumaco, Nariño, hear their husbands saying when they want to go out with friends to socialize.

Women in Tumaco, apart from being victims of the armed conflict, have also been victims of several types of gender violence. Stereotypes around the obedient roles that they must play at home, inequality in the access to land, discrimination in the workplace, and exclusion from the decision-making processes are common.

This constant scenario is what motivated five brave Afro-Colombian women to come together in the park of San Luis Robles, a village located in rural Tumaco, to discuss their role in the development and growth of their territory. That day, in 2018, under a cloudy sky, these women recognized the need for women’s empowerment, mutual support, and the vindication of their rights in order to improve their communities.

 

 

 

 

 

What started as informal discussions about a better future for women, resulted in the creation of Afromuvaras, a business initiative of female cacao producers that belong to the Afro-Colombian Community Council Rescate las Varas. Today, Afromuvaras is comprised of 586 women entrepreneurs from 10 villages, including craftswomen, housewives, singers and soccer players. Each woman sees in cacao an opportunity to apply their knowledge in a vocation different from housework.

“Not just our husbands, the main challenge is ourselves, because we do not believe in ourselves or recognize our own capacities. Here women think that their only role is to be at home and that this is what they should do until they die”, said Ana Ponce, a producer of Afromuvaras.

With the support of the municipal administration and USAID, and with an increasingly strong and viable economy based on cacao, women in Tumaco are demanding gender equality. Ana Ponce and the women of Afromuvaras are motivating others to fight for their rights and leave a clear path for future generations.

Strong evidence of this paradigm shift is Tumaco’s Secretary of Women’s Affairs, which was created in 2021 to work with local women on strengthening women’s rights and access to land. Thanks to a robust strategy aimed at rural women, the Secretary is raising awareness about different forms of gender violence and empowering women to make decisions that contribute to reversing this situation.

“When we are with women in our workshops and we hear them say, “I have to put up with so much from him because I depend economically on him” or “if I report him, who will sustain me?”, we explain to them that these are examples of patrimonial and economic violence.”
-Patricia Castro, the Secretary of Women’s Affairs in Tumaco

A boost for economic development

In 2021, USAID, through its Land for Prosperity Activity, facilitated the creation of a cacao Public-Private Partnership (PPP) in the region that aims to strengthen producer associations like Afromuvaras so they can improve the quality of their grain and access new markets. In 2020, Afromuvaras installed a cacao processing center, a key meeting point where the women come together for the post-harvest process and to define the marketing strategy.

The women from Afromuvaras are aware of the importance of continuing to modernize the cacao production process, so they can offer international buyers a premium product. Still, producing high-quality cacao is one of their biggest challenges.

Under the PPP, they established commercial relationships with CacaoHunters, experts in cacao and one of the country’s biggest buyers and exporters. Today, CacaoHunters buys dry cacao from Afromuvaras at a premium price that recognizes quality.

To leverage the market linkages with CacaoHunters and other buyers, the PPP is also supporting the implementation of traceability models, being led by other partners such as Microsoft, Logyca, the Agency for Rural Development, and USAID.

“With the traceability system, we will be able to know each step of the process. To know which cacao comes from which farm, what the conversion rate was, and how long it took. And as a producer I will be able to know how much I am producing and what quality it is,” explains Johanna Rodríguez, co-founder of Afromuvaras.

Tumaco is being increasingly recognized for its cacao, which has an artisan touch from these Afro-Colombian women and their knowledge of best processing practices. “Today, clients are asking for cacao with certain characteristics, and thanks to the traceability system I can negotiate better conditions because I know the quality of my product,” says Rodríguez.

Customer service

Before the PPP, the women from Afromuvaras hardly had an email address. Thanks to USAID and Microsoft support, the association inaugurated a digital center in the center of San Luis Roble at the end of 2021. The digital center, installed with support from the Land for Prosperity Activity, offers the women entrepreneurs a valuable chance to connect with their clients in real-time to share strategic information about their product and build trust around their value proposition.

The center offers free internet to the entire community. In rural Tumaco, young people are the most interested in using these opportunities to further their education and access information. Senior citizens also come to the center to learn how to use the internet.

The women from Afromuvaras are strengthening their association by modernizing the production of high-quality cacao. However, they also want to be known for their support to the community, especially to young people that already have a committee inside the association so that they can learn about cacao production and promote generational change.

“An association also becomes attractive to clients when, apart from a certified quality, they can see that there is a social and environmental commitment that has a positive impact on the community.” – Oberman Torres, secretary of the Technical Secretariat of the cacao PPP in Tumaco.

Today, Afromuvaras are producing 2-3 metric tons (MT) of cacao each month and want to increase production to 5 MT. This goal, essentially doubling production, will only be possible by improving modernization, traceability, and the capacity of their members with up-to-date technology. With improved production of high-quality cacao, Tumaco will be known halfway across the world.

 

 

 

 

“Nothing is impossible for a woman, it just takes time to achieve it”

Learn more about Afromuvaras (en español) here

Tumaco, San Andres de Tumaco, Narino, Colombia
© 2022 Land for Prosperity

Cross posted from Land for Prosperity Exposure site

A Municipal Land Office in Valencia, Córdoba is helping families protect their property for future generations

Ana Espitia lost her mother two years ago. One day after the funeral, her brother insisted on selling the home that was still in her mother’s name. She was worried and unaware of how she could fight her brother to keep the house where she grew up and had taken care of her cancer-stricken mother in her final years.

“I was always by my mother’s side and I was going to fight for her home,” Espitia explains. “Then I heard that there was a land office in our municipality, and there, a lawyer explained the process to me.

In 1986, when Espitia was just 12, her mother bought the property in Valencia, a small town in northern Colombia, as a way to escape the violence that was increasing across rural areas. If she were forced to sell the home, she would have to find a place to rent in Valencia in an unfavorable real estate market.

Javier Guerra, the Municipal Land Office’s coordinator, explained to Espitia that in order to sell the property, her brother would need to gather all the signatures of her siblings. She was relieved and began studying how she could legally transfer the title into her name.

“Thanks to the Municipal Land Office, I got the type of advice that a lawyer would charge us a lot of money for, because property issues are always complicated here,” she says.

Espitia worked with her siblings to clarify the ownership of the land. In November 2021, the local land office put the cherry on top when it delivered the registered property title in Ana Espitia’s name. Valencia’s municipal government delivered a total of 45 land titles to residents like Ana Espitia, families who have waited over 30 years to finally prove they are bona fide owners of their properties. Espitia, who works as a cook in an elementary school, got time off from her job to attend the ceremony at the municipal park.

Ana Espitia has made improvements on her childhood home, located in Valencia, Córdoba in Northern Colombia.

The Municipal Land Office was first created in 2015 with USAID support and titled dozens of urban properties in the town’s center. The office, which is embedded in the Municipal Urban Planning Office, ramped up operations last year with additional USAID support. In 2021, the office delivered a total of 68 land titles in 2021.

“The Land Office is a big achievement and a great success for municipal administrators and the community. We are bringing land titling to families who have waited 60 years to be recognized as land owners. As a team we are now bringing these services to Valencia’s rural communities, explaining to them that land titling is a process that is totally free.”

The local land office also plays an important role as liaison for the National Land Agency (ANT), which is leading a massive land formalization campaign in Valencia. The office’s local knowledge is critical for the government’s land formalization teams to understand and manage social dynamics, reach communities, and improve efficiency in identifying and understanding land ownership. The methodology, which was jointly designed by USAID and the ANT, collects property data across the entire municipality, mediates land conflicts, and reduces redundancy among land-related entities. The methodology, which combines land titling with updating the municipal cadaster, helps the government to reduce costs by up to 60% as well as the time it takes to formalize a property and streamline that with the nation’s cadaster.

“It’s important to recognize these efforts of the municipality, since they are not physically visible, but they are of great benefit to the population and communities and together we are fighting to create a municipality of property owners,” Martínez says.

Over the last two years, the USAID-funded Land for Prosperity program (LFP) has supported the creation or re-launch of 26 Municipal Land Offices across Colombia. These offices have already titled more than 1,100 properties for families and over 400 public properties like health clinics and schools. USAID is strengthening the capacity of local leaders to maintain formal land ownership, manage land transactions, and enhance the culture of formalization. Using an approach that develops the capacity of public servants and reaches rural communities has the potential to improve the relationship between the public and government institutions while establishing conditions for leaders to mobilize critical funds for improving their municipalities.

USAID-supported municipal land offices have identified over 39,700 parcels and almost 1,000 public parcels that can be titled through their respective municipalities.

 

 

USAID-supported municipal land offices have identified over 39,700 parcels and almost 1,000 public parcels that can be titled through their respective municipalities.

Willing to Invest

With her land title, Ana Espitia has a new outlook on life and gets excited about making investments in her home and yard. She is already planning to pour a concrete floor and improve the bedrooms with doors.

“It’s much easier to make an investment when you know the title is in your hands,” she says. “I feel like I can better organize my life and live with less anxiety.”

In addition, the future of her children also takes on a new meaning. With the land title in her name, she knows she can pass the land down to her daughter and their families.

 

 

 

 

“Knowing my children can benefit from the land makes life more comfortable.” – Ana Espitia

Hamilton’s Life

Hamilton Rodríguez came to Valencia, Córdoba in the year 2000, after his father was killed in El Carmen de Bolívar, Bolívar, where they used to live. After the wave of violence, Hamilton settled in Valencia and in 2013 bought the parcel where he now lives with his wife and four of their eight children. The parcel includes the backyard where Hamilton and his wife grow corn and ñame, and the front porch where Hamilton has his mechanics shop and fixes motorcycles.

However, when Hamilton bought his parcel he did it through an unregistered contract, and he did not receive a formal title to his property. In 2019 Colombia’s Rural Agricultural Planning Unit estimated that 70% of Valencia’s citizens did not have a formal title to their property.

 

To settle one’s debts

In late 2019, Hamilton submitted the paperwork to formalize his parcel but he ran into a problem. “They told me I had to settle all the cadaster debts from my parcel and I had to pay over COP $1 million (around USD $300).” It was very difficult for Hamilton to pay this amount, especially since one of his sons, aged 22, needed surgery to remove a recently discovered tumor. The family had to cover a lot of medical expenses related to the hospital and medicine, and did not have the money to pay the cadaster debt.

Luckily, thanks to Valencia’s Municipal Land Office, the municipality cancelled all debts and allowed him to start the payments from scratch. Thanks to this decision, Hamilton continued with the titling process and was one of the 45 owners who received their property titles in November 2021. Now that they are the formal owners of their parcel, Hamilton and his wife plan to improve and expand their home and his shop.

 

 

Valencia, Cordoba, Colombia
© 2022 Land for Prosperity

Cross posted from Land for Prosperity Exposure site

This piece originally appeared in New Security Beat

By Claire Doyle

In recent years, the urgency of climate action has brought fresh attention to the critical minerals sector. Growing renewable energy investments are driving up demand for resources like lithium, cobalt, and copper, which form the mineral backbone of green technologies. But there are substantial concerns to navigate when it comes to sourcing green energy minerals.

“There’s a risk that in our modern-day mineral rush, without meaningful efforts to do better in the mining sector, there will be casualties,” warned Lauren Risi, Director of the Wilson Center Environmental Change and Security Program, at a recent Wilson Center event on critical minerals, co-hosted by USAID. “The mining industry has a long history and not necessarily a particularly good one,” said Sharon Burke, Founder and President of Ecospherics and Global Fellow at the Wilson Center.

Given the grim legacy of human rights and conflict risks associated with mining, the energy transition presents an opportunity—and a moral imperative—to pursue new approaches to extraction. “We’re already living in a climate stressed world, so we need to make sure that our solutions here in extracting materials for energy transition don’t do greater harm,” said Aimee Boulanger, Executive Director of the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance.

What, then, does better look like for mining? The answer requires reflection and action in all sectors of society and levels of governance. “Better is what we all need to be striving for, whether we’re donors, governments, civil society, or the private sector,” noted Kimberly Thompson, Senior Advisor at USAID.

Yet views of “better” likely will vary among stakeholders “It depends on who you ask,” said Boulanger. “An Indigenous community pressed to the edge, trying to protect what little cultural heritage is left, or a community living downstream of a tailings dam is going to have a different definition of what is good compared to end brands who are giving us the products that we use each day and the mining companies who are striving to supply them.”

Strengthening Community Participation and Benefit-Sharing

Local stakeholders are crucial partners in shaping what “better” looks like, said Amayèle Dia, Senior Protection Program Office at the INGO Pact. From community members and organizations to local government structures, these stakeholders determine whether companies have the social license to operate. But they’re too often seen as a secondary stakeholder, she added, and their views, opinions, and concerns aren’t always taken into account. Exclusion from dialogue opens the door to both problematic mining concessions and human rights violations (like child labor) if communities are left with unmet needs.

To combat child labor in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), where roughly 45,000 children are involved in cobalt mining alone, Pact developed the Children Out of Mining Project. The initiative created an apprenticeship program to help adolescent miners find alternative employment as a response to observations made by a local development committee in the region’s copper-cobalt belt. Using a community-based model and local know-how, the program provides training in automotive mechanics, welding, carpentry, hairdressing, tailoring, and other trades. Since its inauguration close to 10 years ago, it has served several hundred young people in DRC.

Mitigating risks like child labor in the first place, however, requires stronger benefit sharing and up-front community participation in mining decisions. Communities must be involved “to ensure that critical minerals provide tangible [local] benefits” said Dia, citing economic opportunities, sustainable livelihoods, the development of infrastructure in education or health, and access to clean drinking water, among other examples.

Boulanger agreed that the best approach to mining involves working directly with communities. “Without community,” she observed, “we do not have security of supply.”

Recognizing “Hidden Suppliers” and Promoting International Standards

Dia said that another key group also merits greater attention. Artisanal and Small-scale Mining (ASM) operators number about 45 million across 80 countries and produce a sizable portion of global gold, tin, and cobalt supplies. “We cannot do the green transition without ASM operators,” Dia said. But these miners face a slew of challenges: They are often limited by a lack of market opportunities, a lack of expertise, and discriminatory gender norms.

In the larger field of industrial-scale mining, progress is reflected in a growing spotlight on standards and certifications. For instance, the Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance (IRMA), which started 15 years ago with an initial focus on jewelry, is now a leading example of a third-party certifier with participating companies of all sizes located around the world.

“We have companies like Anglo American saying they will be audited at all their mine sites,” said Boulanger, “and smaller companies, [like] Carrizal in Mexico or Albemarle, who are still willing to do this, even though they’re starting companies.”

Certifications can help ensure that environmental, social, and governance concerns have been addressed by companies big and small. Public-facing audits should be emphasized in certification processes, noted Boulanger, because they enable communities to weigh in on the impacts of mining activities. “We need to be sure we ask communities whether the suppliers to our end brands are doing less harm,” she said. Certification programs also need to tackle mining risks in a holistic way, making sure not to inadvertently trade one risk for another.

IRMA is a crucial tool for developing higher mining standards and ensuring transparency, but legislation is ultimately needed to secure broad and lasting changes in the mining sector. “A voluntary initiative like IRMA is never going to replace the rule of law and government,” said Boulanger. “We need to improve these laws, and a global standard like IRMA can be used as a template and a support to governments as they increase and improve the strength of their laws and the robustness of their legal structure.”

Expanding Policy and Partnerships

In the U.S., the recent Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) represents a $370 billion investment in clean energy and tech, said Helaina Matza, Director of the Office of Energy Transformation at the State Department.

One key aim of the IRA is to onshore part of the energy supply chain, including critical minerals. Christopher Smith, Chief Government Affairs Officer at Ford, observed that “as we move to electrification and manufacture batteries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and power our economy, the United States government feels like it should have a greater direct role in overseeing and managing environmental issues that are associated with the extraction and the processing of said minerals. The idea is to move those minerals back to the US or to countries with which the US has a free trade agreement.”

Apart from the IRA, Matza said that the US government has been working on critical minerals issues through two State Department initiatives that seek to build cooperation across countries: The Energy Resource Governance Initiative (ERGI) and the Minerals Security Partnership. “There are important resources everywhere, and the only way to make a global energy transition is if we cooperate,” said Burke.

ERGI supports capacity development for ESG in mineral producing countries around the world, explained Matza. Since it began in 2018, ERGI has brought over $30 million to countries like Argentina, Uganda, and most recently the DRC. The State Department has also developed an ERGI toolkit, which features targeted learning modules for mining sector professionals on everything from production and stewardship to working with Indigenous communities.

Matza added that this past June, the State Department also created the Minerals Security Partnership with the participation of ten other governments to “start diversifying clean energy supply chains.” The Partnership is using existing ESG criteria like IRMA to have clear conversations with countries and companies about what it means to uphold robust standards, and it is already providing insights into the thinking and priorities of producing countries across the globe.

“Many of the countries we spoke with… want to make sure that they have a true understanding of their resource base,” said Matza, “so that as they tender out projects or start making modifications to their royalty or tax regimes, they understand that they’re doing so in a way that totally serves their community.” She also noted that these countries want to see their own leaders and experts involved in these projects and want to develop value added industries within the green energy economy.

As we look towards a renewable energy future, legislation at home must do “a lot more than just securing supply chains,” said Matza. It must secure supply chains “in a way that really supports the economic development and growth of all economies involved.”

Transparency and Better Technology as a Competitive Advantage

“End brand” companies like the leading automaker Ford also need to shore up resilient and reliable supplies in an ethical manner. “Electrification is going be the key to future transportation,” said Smith. “And right at the middle of that is the ability to access and mine and refine these minerals that you need for these batteries in a way that’s consistent with our larger values.”

Despite the complex supply chain of Ford’s products, Smith said Ford is keen on responsible sourcing. “There’s a great deal of visibility on a brand like Ford, and it’s an important part of our competitive advantage to do these things well.”

New types of extraction technologies, including a recently-developed method of extracting lithium that is less water-intensive, offer another path to “better” mining. Investments in innovation could lead to technologies that reduce the mining sector’s environmental impact and minimize its risks—if these new methods are pursued alongside community participation, international standards, corporate initiatives, and cooperation across governments.

Even with all of these avenues operating in tandem, however, “the mining sector is never going to be perfect,” Thompson admitted. “It’s a difficult industry. But we really can and we must do better. We must learn from our mistakes. We must draw lessons from the resource curses of the past. We must learn to empower and listen to local communities. We must learn to manage environmental and social risks and insulate the sector from corruption. In short, we need to learn to govern the sector better.”

Sources: Diálogo Chino, Energy Resource Governance Initiative Toolkit, Initiative for Responsible Mining Assurance, Pact, U.S. Department of Energy, U.S. Department of State. 

Photo Credit: Panel of speakers at the event, courtesy of the Environmental Change and Security Program/Wilson Center.