Document Type: Briefs

In 2016, ERC with subcontractor Bixal, redesigned and rebranded the USAID Land Tenure website. Beginning in May, ERC and Bixal worked with USAID’s E3/Land Office to identify website priorities, functionality requirements, and to understand how stakeholders, including other USAID Bureaus, interact with the site. The goals for the website were to create a visually appealing site that can be used to communicate USAID activities in a way that is clear and compelling, to share research and data, and to promote the office’s vision and agenda.

To make ongoing maintenance and continuous upgrades efficient and cost effective, the website was moved to a WordPress publishing platform, allowing the site to utilize out of the box templates and plugins. The site was given a responsive design, making it friendly for mobile devices. The homepage was redone to showcase USAID’s cross-sector impacts, recent content, and features an interactive map that links to Land Tenure projects, impact evaluations, and country profiles. The website’s search function, navigation, and content organization were updated, making the content flow more intuitive and materials easier to find. New content was developed for the primary menu pages, providing stakeholders with an overview of land tenure and information on the tools and resources available for USAID staff and global development professionals. A new color palate consistent with USAID’s branding standards was implemented and the website was rebranded as LandLinks, allowing the website to be easily identified as related to other USAID sites, including Agrilinks, Microlinks, and Climatelinks.

The website redesign was completed on October 11. The new website was promoted via a dedicated email and social media. The same month that the new LandLinks.org was launched, website traffic reached 9,887 user sessions, indicating how many times the website was being used. This is the highest number of sessions in the portal’s entire history.

How do you most effectively build capacity within USAID and the broader global development community to better understand and address one of today’s most important and complex issues? How do you efficiently deliver a state of the art training to a diverse audience of practitioners, researchers and government officials spread around the globe? How do you facilitate dialogues and build connections so that participants can learn from each other and from experts in the field?

Those questions drove USAID’s Land Tenure and Resource Management Office to create an innovative training program: a Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) on Land Tenure and Property Rights. The first iteration of this course, which ran from September 14, 2015 – January 1, 2016, on the Canvas platform, was one of USAID’s first-ever MOOCs. It brought together 1,969 participants from over 60 countries to examine and discuss land tenure and property rights issues and best practices.

Through 14 modules and three country case studies, the course presented theories, evidence and best practices related to property rights in real-world settings. Each module featured reading assignments and video lectures from leading researchers and practitioners – including experts from USAID, Yale University, Michigan State University, the International Organization for Migration, and others. Importantly, the course also featured interactive discussion forums and periodic live Google Hangouts, allowing participants to ask and answer questions, share insights and experiences, and engage in peer-to-peer learning.

USAID developed the MOOC 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.

With the first iteration now completed, participant surveys, quiz results, and statistics on user participation and retention are being analyzed to help improve future versions of the course. Based on this analysis, the MOOC will be tweaked and version 2.0 will be released later in 2016.

Five years after the devastating 2010 earthquake, land tenure and property rights issues remain central to ongoing recovery, reconstruction and broader development efforts in Haiti. Weak land administration systems, lack of government capacity and a complex bureaucratic legal system have led to confusion, insecurity, and disputes over who has what rights to which pieces of land. These challenges have greatly impeded the Government of Haiti and the international community’s efforts to rebuild infrastructure and housing, enhance food security, improve resilience to future disasters and reduce extreme poverty in the Western Hemisphere’s poorest nation.

Recognizing the importance of land tenure and property rights issues to USAID/Haiti’s core development objectives, USAID/Washington’s Office of Land Tenure and Resource Management
(LTRM) organized a training program to improve capacity within the Mission to better understand and address this issue. In September and October 2014, USAID/LTRM and a team of specialists from the Evaluation, Research and Communication (ERC) program traveled to Haiti for a 3-day workshop on Land Tenure and Property Rights Issues and Best Practices.

The workshop brought together practitioners from across USAID/Haiti’s various operating units – from economic growth to agriculture to democracy and governance – along with civil society partners and Government of Haiti representatives from the various agencies with oversight over land tenure issues. Over the course of the workshop – through presentations, facilitated discussions and small group exercises – participants gained a deeper understanding of the institutional and legal framework for land tenure in Haiti, as well as the different, complex sources of tenure security and insecurity.

The final day of the workshop was devoted to working with USAID/Haiti staff to identify cross-cutting land tenure issues affecting different aspects of the Mission’s development portfolio and identifying specific strategies to better address this critical issue in current and future programming. While important progress was made in improving understanding of Haiti’s unique land tenure challenges and identifying possible solutions, this workshop was only an initial step in USAID’s efforts to affect positive change on this complex topic in Haiti.

In August 2016, USAID completed the successful food security-focused Land Reform and Farm Restructuring Project (LRFRP).  ERC Senior Communications Specialist Sandra Coburn visited the project in June to document its successes and to capture photos and stories for communications products.  Communications TDYs have a history of success for ERC and have produced some of the most popular and well-read content for ERC’s audience.  These communications materials also support the USAID missions, which may have limited communications capacity, and create new opportunities to reach a broader base of USAID global staff by adding a human face to development programming and demonstrating cross-sector impacts of land projects.

On International Youth Day, ERC created a photo essay about how the LRFRP project was utilizing a public information campaign to educate Tajikistan’s youth through high school classes in the rural Khatlon Province and in law classes at two universities.  Youth were identified by the project as influential within their communities, particularly in rural areas, because they can provide new information to families that often have limited education and understanding of legal reforms.  The students that participated in the land reform courses were eager to share their knowledge and actively solve community land problems within their local villages.

The photo essay, “From Classroom to Community:  How Tajikistan’s Youth are Changing the Way We Look at Land Rights,” captured the stories and photos of several students, demonstrating the ways that they were making a difference by resolving land rights challenges, as well as the linkages between secure land rights, food security, and education.  This photo essay marked the first piece for USAID Environmental using Medium, Twitter’s popular photo, and storytelling website.  This photo essay was promoted with a dedicated email to ERC’s outreach list and through social media.  Written to be an evergreen story, the photo essay can be shared multiple times throughout ERC.  This public piece received praise from both land experts and mission audiences and provided USAID’s Land Office with a new messaging platform.

The ERC impact evaluation (IE) of the USAID/Zambia-funded Community-based Forest Management Program (CFP) in Zambia aims to provide USAID with better information on climate change and land tenure and property rights (LTPR) within the context of REDD+ projects. More specifically, USAID’s primary learning objectives for the CFP IE are to understand how REDD+ programs impact LTPR and related livelihoods, and to learn about what aspects of REDD+ programming are most effective in incentivizing long-term carbon sequestration and reduced GHG emissions from forests and landscapes.  Baseline data collection for the CFP IE launched in March 2015 and concluded in April 2015. Data collection activities across the Nyimba, Mambwe, and Lundazi districts included the facilitation of 4395 household surveys, 820 wives surveys, 282 headperson surveys, 258 key informant interviews, 80 focus group discussions, and 40 participatory mapping exercises.

The CFP IE is the first ERC IE to employ participatory mapping exercises as a part of the evaluation methodology. Preliminary findings from this quarter’s analysis of the baseline data suggest that the data obtained from the participatory mapping exercises is particularly valuable in contributing to the survey team’s understanding of forest users, the norms and values they share, and the context in which forest use, access, and decision making take place. Additionally, because the exercise was carried out with separate groups of men and women from the same village, the mapping data contributes to our knowledge of gendered differences in perceptions, needs, and access to resources across the study area.

Throughout each exercise, groups of people were asked by a facilitator to draw a map of their village. Participants were asked to include specific objects and areas relevant to the CFP IE research questions, such as village infrastructure, village boundaries, agricultural fields, nearby forests, and sources of fuel and water. Participants were also asked to identify and explain the spaces and resources most important to their village. Once the map was complete, the facilitator asked the group to share and explain the image they created. Designed to complement the CFP IE quantitative instruments, the mapping exercises allowed participants to articulate and communicate their knowledge and understanding of their village and surrounding areas.

While the maps spatially identify key resources and spaces, the translated transcripts of the corresponding discussions reveal that the participatory mapping exercise successfully created an open forum for discussion and sharing information, allowing respondents to explain in their own words the complex social, political, economic and cultural dimensions of their livelihoods. The preliminary analysis of the data obtained sheds light on primary activities in the study area leading to forest degradation and the reasons they occur, forest access and management, perceptions of climate change and tenure security, and the significant effects of lost access to forest resources on forest-based livelihoods.

While the CFP quantitative survey instruments produce data that answers “what” types of questions, the participatory mapping data can help address “how” and “why” types of questions from the perspective of the participants themselves. This provides the evaluation team with a locally informed, culturally nuanced understanding of villages and their resources. ERC believes that juxtaposing and joining the cultural knowledge of the participatory maps with the other IE data will allow for better comprehension and explanation of CFP impacts, thus showcasing an example of a successful IE instrument that will help better inform USAID and it partners on LTPR in the context of forest-based livelihoods and what aspects of REDD+ programming are most effective.

In Kenya’s traditional, patriarchal Maasai society, women are gaining a new voice and increasingly, their rights to land are being recognized and upheld. Twenty-two women were elected as community elders in 2013, up from 14 in 2012, and zero three years ago. This transformation was made possible thanks to a USAID-supported pilot project, Enhancing Customary Justice Systems in the Mau Forest, Kenya, also known as the Kenya Justice Project (KJP). KJP started during a unique window of opportunity that opened following a violent post-election conflict in 2007/8.  The violence led to the adoption of a new progressive constitution in 2010.  This new constitution enshrines women’s equal rights to property and formalizes the role of traditional leaders as local dispute resolvers.

KJP focused on educating key stakeholder groups through legal literacy and skills training, peer sessions, community conversations, and public information activities to increase legal knowledge around constitutional rights and traditional leaders’ responsibilities related to land. The project also demonstrated to Kenyan and U.S. government officials that land is the number one issue of concern for rural communities. While the pilot was designed specifically for the Mau Forest, it could be adapted in other regions. To help replicate the success of the KJP model across Kenya, additional funding was allocated in 2014 for a second phase of KJP to produce a new draft implementation guide to be field-tested in partnership with Kenyan governmental and non-governmental organizations and then broadly disseminated.

The implementation guide outlines KJP’s underlying principles, and the steps, resources and time needed to prepare for and launch similar efforts in new communities.  Although the pilot had little funding across phases, $490,000 to date, it secured buy-in from key players in the Kenyan government, including the Chief Justice and the ministers of justice and land. Importantly, it implemented education and behavior change activities at a comfortable pace using trainers who were respected members of the local community.

Education and high-level buy-in were the keys to the success of this unique pilot project.  Education was targeted at all levels of the community—from traditional elders and chiefs to youth and children, and women.  Each group learned about and discussed their rights under the constitution. Traditional leaders came to see the important role they play under this new constitution:  they are responsible for upholding women’s rights to land.  At the same time, they came to see the important role that women play in the community and the benefits that all families could experience by securing women’s rights to land.  With this different perspective, traditional leaders invited women to become elders and sit with them to decide local cases.  Women and men became confident that they could claim their rights through a more impartial legal process instead of using violence or extra-judicial means. USAID’s Senior Rule of Law Advisor, Ms. Achieng Akumu observed, “People are hungry for this – they have seen the improvement in their lives and are ready for it with the constitution’s devolution of rights.”

According to KJP’s implementing partner, Landesa, “With broader implementation, the transformation that has taken place in the pilot community of Ol Pusimoru can take hold across Kenya, enhancing women’s rights and economic opportunities for all.” With additional funding for training-the-trainer activities, the KJP pilot can be sustainably handed off for host-country ownership and be scaled across Kenya.

From 2005-2012, the Government of Burkina Faso put into law an ambitious vision of rural land tenure reform.  It included giving rural families a land certificate (APFR) that formally recognized their customary rights to land.  The vision also included establishing local offices to prepare these certificates and conduct other land administration activities.  Since that time, however, only a few thousand families have actually received APFRs, largely due to the difficult operating conditions in rural Burkina Faso.  Thus, there is a need to figure out how to provide APFRs to people faster, cheaper, and easier; otherwise these rural people will not benefit from the new law.

To address this challenge, ERC pilot-tested the use of smartphones, linked with handheld GPS devices, to quickly map rural land parcels and capture data about the land users needed to prepare APFRs for them.  The IT platform is called MAST – the Mobile Application to Secure Tenure – and is designed for use by villagers with a high-school education and cell-phone experience.  The testing took place in four villages in Boudry Commune (east of Ouagadougou), with significant participation from the local property registration office (SFR) and the National Land Observatory of Burkina Faso (www.onf-bf.org).  The implementation period was September 2016-February 2017.

The pilot results were impressive.  In only 25 days, 12 villagers used MAST to map and capture data on 2,708 rural land parcels.  Prior efforts generally took more time and required deployment of trained surveyors, driving up costs and reducing the ability to implement on a large scale.

Using MAST on a large scale will require additional investment in hardware and software infrastructure and more troubleshooting, but the pilot results offer a compelling case that MAST can deliver APFRs at less expense and greater speed than heretofore seen in Burkina Faso.

Impact evaluations (IEs) are essential for determining the effect and effectiveness of USAID programs on development outcomes. IEs depend wholly on accurate identification of comparison communities and the collection of high-quality data. To enhance both factors, ERC continues to develop and perfect new evaluation methodologies and approaches. The recently launched baseline data collection for the Land Administration to Nurture Development project (LAND) IE in Afar, Ethiopia, which is focused on pastoral areas of the region, uses two such innovative methods.

To improve the accuracy of sample selection, a community listing was conducted before the launch of baseline data collection. For community listings, the survey team visits each prospective treatment and control community and conducts a short, census-style survey with a community leader. The survey collects general community characteristics such as population, number of female-headed households, settlement patterns, and grazing routes, and GPS coordinates of key community areas. Using the listing and GPS data, Geospatial Analysts in E3/Land developed a list of indicators derived from geospatial data, including road density, market access, and the prevalence of invasive bush species. These indicators were used to create a subsample of matched treatment and control communities for the larger data collection effort of the IE. Since national organizations rarely have accurate community or micro-level data, the listing process allows the research team to select more accurate control communities, which strengthens the validity of the evaluation.

To improve the quality of the baseline data, ERC designed a rigorous mapping exercise in which facilitators lead local herders and scouts in drawing their wet and dry season grazing areas, migration routes, settlement areas, water points, and important natural landmarks. Large format base maps were prepared, then participants used color-coded markers to denote different areas and points of interest. The maps created in these exercises can be digitized and analyzed using geographic information system (GIS) software to generate quantitative data including travel times to grazing areas, spatial patterns in land and water point management, and spatial patterns in lost access to land and water points. Despite its importance to pastoral communities and the programs affecting them, this type of data is largely undocumented and represents a major knowledge gap which ERC is attempting to fill.

The Evaluation, Research, and Communication team (ERC) is currently preparing for the endline data collection and analysis of the Tenure and Global Climate Change (TGCC) impact evaluation (IE) in Zambia. The foundation for the endline analysis is laid out in the pre-analysis plan and a major part of that is reviewing and incorporating monitoring and evaluation (M&E) data collected from implementing partners. M&E data provide important information for endline data collection and analyses planning, and better inform the interpretation of endline results. During this quarter, ERC collaborated with E3/Land and the TGCC implementing teams to develop a detailed M&E protocol with corresponding instruments, and then to collect the M&E data.

The Chipata District Land Alliance (CDLA) implemented a land tenure certification program while COMACO implemented an agroforestry extension program, each working concurrently within and around the same regions. CDLA and COMACO each completed M&E instruments, which consisted of two short structured surveys and two short open-ended qualitative questionnaires, providing basic and extended information for their respective interventions. In particular, the quantitative surveys collected basic implementation information across the interventions, and identify any major differences in program implementation across villages and key reasons for this. The data collected from CDLA M&E tools provide a strong understanding of household land registration processes under the program, the different types of land categories that are used, and the people who were chosen by the households to be listed on the document. The data collected from the COMACO tools describe implementation activities in detail, including the process that was used for offering the agroforestry intervention to households in the agroforestry treatment villages, and some of the observed reasons for stronger or weaker interest in agroforestry among targeted households.

M&E data allows for more accurate tests and interpretations of reasons for impact variation. It also makes it possible to create indicator variables that can be used in the endline analyses to test how program implementation differences might moderate impacts. Specifically, this M&E data establish how the land tenure and agroforestry interventions are proceeding in practice relative to how the program was planned and enables the IE team to verify the nature and timing of the different activities. Furthermore, identifying any major variations in program implementation across villages can reveal potential outlier cases or issues that could influence results, and appropriate analytic steps can be taken. With all of this information, the IE instruments can be updated by adding or removing questions as appropriate based on actual implementation results and any indicators to be developed.

In Tanzania, USAID is building the capacity of local youth to map and record land rights through the Mobile Application to Secure Tenure (MAST) pilot project. The MAST pilot is testing the viability of an innovative participatory, “crowdsourced” approach to capturing land rights information using mobile technology. The first phase of the project is nearing completion in Ilalasimba, a village of 325 households in Iringa Rural District.

Centrally important to this process are local youth, who are trained to capture geospatial data and information about households and householders’ tenure rights using the MAST application on smartphones. These youth serve as “Trusted Intermediaries” for their community. Rather than having outsiders measure land parcels and record rights, youth from the community collect this data, working alongside other villagers who help to resolve disputes and verify claims. The goal is to enhance trust in the process, build skills, and support local systems.

Trusted Intermediaries are trained on the provisions of Tanzania’s land laws, with a special emphasis on women’s rights to land. Following this training, these young women and men learn to use the MAST mobile application. Training takes place over four days and involves District Land Office (DLO) personnel and members of Ilalasimba’s Land Adjudication Committee (LAC). Out of a pool of fifteen, eight youth in Ilalasimba were selected based on their enthusiasm and proficiency with the technology:  four were women and four were men.

In just under three weeks these ambitious young people mapped 937 parcels—all of the household parcels in the village. To put this in some context, the DLO issued approximately 1,000 CCROs between 2004 and 2010 and 10,000 between 2010 and 2014. Working in agricultural fields, on wooded hillsides, and around ravines, the Trusted Intermediaries mapped, on average, 55 parcels a day. The data they collected was then uploaded to a cloud-based database and validated by DLO officials. Once data was validated and confirmed by village leaders, the DLO will print Certificates of Customary Rights of Occupancy (CCROs)—formal recognition of land rights.

In May 2015 Jackline Nyantalima, a 23-year old Trusted Intermediary said this about her experience with MAST:  “I was trained on land rights. Before this many people did not understand the importance of land and their rights in land. This work has importance for our society and I am happy to be a part of this process.”

Jackline and her fellow Trusted Intermediaries will play another important role, as MAST expands to two new villages they will help to train and mentor the next groups of Trusted Intermediaries. By sharing their experiences and their ideas about what worked well and what did not work well with the MAST process, these young people are helping to strengthen this pilot.