Introduction
This Evaluation Design Proposal corresponds to the impact evaluation (IE) of USAID/Tanzania’s Feed the Future Tanzania Land Tenure Assistance (LTA) activity. This IE is being implemented by the E3 Analytics and Evaluation Project1 and commissioned by USAID’s Office of Land and Urban in the Bureau for Economic Growth, Education, and Environment (USAID/E3/LU). USAID’s draft Statement of Work (SOW) for this evaluation is included in Annex A. The IE design incorporates a phase-in randomized controlled trial (RCT) to rigorously test how effective the provision of land certification is in increasing land investment, promoting the empowerment of underrepresented groups, strengthening tenure security, decreasing land disputes, and improving environmentally sustainable practices.
This document provides the framework for the IE design, and was updated in September 2017 to include subsequent details and a revised timeline and estimated budget based on changes to the implementation schedule that occurred after Phase I of the evaluation. First, it describes the Tanzanian context and the main LTA activity components, which have been designed to address the key causal factors of land tenure specific to Tanzania. Then, it reviews the existing evidence and remaining knowledge gaps in the land tenure literature, which provides the motivation for this IE. The document then lays out the evaluation questions, evaluation design, and key outcome measures of interest. Subsequent sections focus on the data collection methods and the sampling plan, followed by a discussion of the data analysis methods and the strengths and limitations of the evaluation design, which includes updates based on changes in LTA activity implementation between Phase I and Phase II of the evaluation.
Background
The Tanzanian land rights system is based on public ownership of land, with all land owned by the state and held in trust by the President. The majority of land in Tanzania is designated as Village Land, which is governed by the 1999 Village Land Act. The Act recognizes the rights of villages to hold and govern land according to customary law. Individuals residing on or using Village Land have the right to obtain formal documentation of their rights in the form of a Certificate of Customary Right of Occupancy (CCRO), which can be issued at the local government level.
In practice, most villagers do not have CCROs for their plots and lack formal documentation of their land rights (Pederson 2010). Land use demarcation and mapping that are required to issue the documents have not yet been completed in many villages. Moreover, the District Land Offices (DLOs) responsible for issuing CCROs frequently lack the capacity to do so, and rural land users are often unaware of their land rights under the law.